Graham Buttrick
Graham is no longer a Research Fellow at Warwick Medical School, Coventry, UK.
Articles by Graham Buttrick
From time to time on BitesizeBio you will find people writing about books that have influenced how they think about science. It seems only fitting, then, to have a review of the book that launched the idea at the root of all modern biology into the popular consciousness. The first edition of Charles Darwin’s The…
Of all the words you write to prepare a manuscript, too often the most important ten or so are left as an afterthought. You’ve slaved for weeks to finish your manuscript. Through draft and re-draft, you managed to shoehorn hundreds of man-hours of careful lab work into the word limit designed to be precisely 300…
By the time you read this, I’ll have left the lab. Not as in popped home in the evening for my daily allowance of food and sleep. Not even as in taken a long weekend to recharge the batteries. I mean as in properly, irreversibly left the lab. After spending the best part of a…
Protein tags are invaluable tools for the modern biologist, particularly if you work on one of the 99% of proteins for which there isn’t a nice antibody readily available. If you want to purify large amounts of your protein of interest, detect it by western blot or fluorescence microscopy, or identify its potential binding partners,…
I first read “The Golem: What You Should Know about Science” as an undergraduate student for an introduction to the sociology of scientific knowledge. I feel it’s an important book for anyone who wants to understand how science works. Ten years later, I still find myself revisiting it. Read on to find out why… In…
Picture the scene: standing at your bench, you look up at the shelf of neatly-labelled bottles of fresh buffers, you see your pipettes arrayed in size order by your right hand, the gleaming expanse of your bench is in front of you, ready for you to perform wonders of science on its routinely-cleansed surface. In…
It’s pretty likely you’ll have heard of impact factors, either through colleagues talking about them in the lab, or from a journal homepage advertising its latest score. Whilst impact factor is a relatively artificial value, it is something that journal editors, scientists and some funding agencies take seriously. It’s therefore important to understand what it…
Tandem affinity purification is a development of existing techniques for purifying protein complexes from cells in physiological conditions. It was first described over ten years ago and has become a commonplace laboratory tool. In this brief article I’ll introduce the basic technique and describe some of its advantages. Biology is a team game. Most biological…
Phosphorylation is one of the major post-translational modifications that regulate the activity of a protein. Around a third of human proteins are believed to be phosphorylated, and so the kinases and phosphatases that mediate protein phosphorylation are of major interest to biomedical researchers. However detecting protein phosphorylation can be difficult, particularly from cell extracts. Phospho-specific…