Ilona Mareckon
Ilona received a PhD in Cell and Tissue Biology at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.
Articles by Ilona Mareckon
If you have any training in genetics, chances are that during the course of your education you ran into those funny little sequences called microsatellites. These are repeated tandem motifs 1-6 nucleotides long, scattered all over our genomes. These used to be called “junk DNA,” because researchers thought that the repeats served no purpose. Nowadays,…
Enzymes are special among proteins. It is not enough to detect them. You need to know their activity level. If you have devoted a substantial part of your research to studying proteases, like I did, you’ll know how crucial it is to choose an appropriate enzyme assay. There’s a heap of lab techniques out there…
We use fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques routinely to detect DNA or RNA sequences in tissues, but what about micro RNAs (miRNAs)? No worries, FISH is now optimized to meet the challenge. To help you get going with the method, here’s what you need to know. The first thing that comes to mind when…
Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, can be detected on tissue slides using stains in conjunction with immunohistochemistry and/or reporter assays.
In situ zymography (ISZ) is the best choice to study proteases. Proteases are a challenge to study as proteases are extremely potent enzymes. As such, they need to be controlled at multiple levels to prevent them from being unleashed and making a cellular mess. Regulation of their activity occurs at virtually all levels: transcriptional control,…
A routine task in the lab is to investigate the presence of your favorite protein in a range of histological samples. No doubt, staining your tissue sections using good old immunohistochemistry (IHC) would be your first choice. You just got to love a technique that has celebrated its 70th birthday, and is still used in…