Laura-Nadine Schuhmacher
After gaining a PhD in Pharmacology/Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge where she researched how naked mole rats have adapted to hypoxia, Laura is now a postdoc at the Francis Crick Insitute/UCL in London. She joined Bitesize Bio as a freelance editor because she is interested in everything that happens in the lab, her own research is on synapse degeneration and neurodegenerative diseases.
Articles by Laura-Nadine Schuhmacher
Now that we’ve learned about the role of apoptosis in good health and disease, it will be useful to know how we can detect apoptosis in cells or organisms. A variety of apoptosis detection kits are commercially available, and here is a roundup of how they work: TUNEL and DNA damage assays The TUNEL assay…
Like yin and yang, apoptosis has a duality. While it is is a pathway used in the normal maintenance and development of tissues in healthy organisms it also had a dark side. As you can imagine, apoptosis is a tightly regulated process – controlled by the integration of multiple pro- and anti-apoptotic signals. Ultimately the induction…
Everybody has to die at some point. But fortunately, the death of a cell does not mean the end of the organism, at least for us metazoans. Indeed, controlled cell death a.k.a apoptosis, or programmed cell death, is an integral part of the biology of all organisms, from nematodes on up. Apoptosis is central to…
In Part 1, I introduced the types of cell walls out there and what they are made of – now it’s time to learn how to get through them. 1. Mechanical methods of cell disruption Mechanical cell disruption is really just that: forcing open the cell wall and spilling the contents. The advantage to mechanical…
Did you ever encounter resistance from a mammalian cell line when trying to extract the contents? Probably not, because destroying cell membranes is easy. Cell walls however are a different story. They are rigid, protective layers that can be so strong that the organism gives up movement in favour of protection! Cell walls exist in…
So you’ve isolated your DNA or RNA from your favorite sample. And now, if you are anything like me, the first thing you’ll do is scramble to check the quality and concentration of your extract. You have a few different options at your disposal to perform this crucial analysis, which will let you know whether…
There is no such thing as “junk” DNA Until recently, vast areas of the genome had been denounced as “junk” DNA, because they do not encode proteins. However, it has become clear that these regions have a large diversity of other functions, from transcriptional and translational regulation to the protection of genes and genome integrity.…
Conserved elements are stretches of DNA sequence that are under purifying selection. That means mutations leading to a change of function in this part of the DNA are detrimental to the organism and will not become fixed in the genome, but rather discarded by natural selection. The level of conservation between species gives an idea…