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Protease inhibitors are a requirement in many lab experiments. In this article, we’ll take you through how protease inhibitors work, why we need them, and how to use them correctly and safely.
Facing hours of cell culture, or some other repetitive and mundane lab task? Why not cheer things up with a podcast or two! Discover our top 10 favorite science podcasts for researchers, from Sawbones to The Life Scientific.
Accuracy and precision are critical for achieving reliable and reproducible results. Read on to discover what these terms mean and how to improve your accuracy and precision.
Are you looking to improve your lab work, publication record, and grant success rate? Then read our guide to feedback—what it is, where it should come from, and how to give it to others.
The art of delegation can help save time and give you a happy, more productive lab life. Discover how with our easy guide to delegation for scientists.
If you’ve worked in a lab, odds are you’ve had an encounter with filtration of one sort or another. Do you understand exactly how filters work, though? Or have you wondered why certain filters are used for certain lab applications?
Don’t just take in on faith that your measurements are accurate. Discover how to verify your measurements using gage R&R studies.
Discover the critical considerations when choosing a fluorescent protein, the key features of those most commonly used, and why newer might be better.
How do you know when your bacterial culture is “done” growing? Read on to learn how to monitor bacterial growth using OD600 measurements, and how to figure out when you should harvest your culture.
Deciding to quit graduate school is a tough decision. But people have gone before you (and survived): get their advice on how to exit gracefully here.
How can you tackle work when it seems daunting or even impossible to know what will happen and when? Take things one bite at a time and try time blocking!
Working late nights or weekends in the lab—we’ve all been there. Why isn’t your cell culture considerate enough to get to exponential phase during normal business hours, anyway? Maybe you just need utter peace and quiet while you pipette hundreds of wells worth of stinky beta-mercaptoethanol. Or perhaps you’re using your wealth of microbiology knowledge…
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if someone helped you step-by-step through your job search? A good recruiter does exactly that! Recruiters provide value to job-seekers by reviewing resumes, finding jobs that may be a good fit, and providing interview tips. But how does that process work? In this article we’ll cover…
Have you ever wished you could snag individual strands of DNA or RNA with a lasso? Or look at them one by one, figuring out exactly where they are or what they are doing? Fortunately, there are techniques that exist to label nucleic acids for their visualization and purification! Nucleic acids can be labeled at…
Long before “Alexa” was a household name, Alexa dyes were an established series of fluorescent dyes. The inventor Richard Paul Haugland named the dyes after his son Alex. Originally a trademark of Molecular Probes, the Alexa family is now a part of Thermo Fisher Scientific. Alexa dyes are frequently used as labels in fluorescence microscopy,…
If you plan to work with purified DNA in the lab, it’s likely that you will use a commercial DNA extraction kit to isolate and purify your DNA of interest. With so many types of kits available, it can be a major challenge to choose the best one to use when working with an unfamiliar…
When you think about culturing bacteria or fungi in large quantities, you likely envision flasks shaking or maybe bioreactors filled to the brim with liquid media. But did you know that many bacteria and fungi can grow on solid carriers without being submerged in liquid? Enter solid state fermentation (SSF). In this article, I’ll introduce…
Designing and running PCR reactions in the lab has become so commonplace that the number of primer design tools available can be a bit overwhelming for a beginner (or even an experienced molecular biologist!). Below are four of my favorite online programs available to make primer design quick, easy, and effective. A quick note before…
My favorite reason for being a biologist is that I am endlessly amazed by how life adapts to various pressures on planet Earth. This especially holds true for endospores, one of nature’s most resilient means of surviving for thousands of years in non-ideal environmental conditions. In this article, we’ll explore some of the extreme environments…
What do water pipe slime, dental plaque, and persistent contact lens case contamination have in common? All are the result of biofilms! Biofilms are aggregates of microbes that adhere to surfaces using secreted matrices. Although relatively under explored, this fascinating phenomenon plays a critical role in some of the biggest challenges currently facing medicine, ranging…
If you’ve ever been on the job market, you know how many job applications you can end up filling out and submitting. Sometimes the entire process takes months or even years to culminate in the right job offer! It can be overwhelming to keep track of what you applied for and when. This is especially…
There’s nothing better than relaxing at the end of a long week with a good movie. As scientists, we are drawn to analyze (and sometimes overanalyze) the accuracy of science movies and especially their portrayal of scientists. Being the movie aficionado that I am, I looked for movies that are not typically touted for their…
Have you ever wondered how to make professional, easy-to-understand figures of molecules for presentations or publications? While several programs exist for this purpose, ChemDraw is like the Swiss Army knife of chemical sketching programs that most chemists and journals use to prepare figures. Beyond the ability to create chemically accurate and legible figures, ChemDraw can…
One of my favorite things about being a biochemist is to imagine everything at the molecular level—sometimes, in very corny ways. I envision the proteins I pipet and mix as dynamic characters in a molecular soap opera that intermingle with each other in complex ways. The biomolecular characters in my soap opera interact and react,…
In my last article, I discussed how to best keep your lab’s HPLC running smoothly. However, even the best-maintained HPLCs and columns need periodic cleaning. Today, I’ll describe how to identify and troubleshoot a clogged HPLC column. Columns ARE Finite First of all, it’s important to realize that columns do have a finite lifetime. The…
If you’re anything like me, your biggest lab fear is working with expensive equipment prone to damage. HPLC is a wonderful tool, capable of separating, identifying, and quantifying a vast array of compounds, but it requires an attentive scientist to properly handle and maintain each component. In this article I’ll describe a few basic handling…
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