Couples Counseling for Zebrafish

Couples Counselling for Zebrafish: How to Optimize Breeding Efficiency

It’s Sunday morning, the sun has just begun to rise, and you find yourself on the way to the lab (again!), sipping hot coffee and melancholically thinking of your abandoned bed. But something is different this time. Today, the freezing-cold wind blowing from behind is not the only motivation pushing you to sacrifice another weekend in…

transformation

Bacterial Transformation Troubleshooting for Beginners

The first time I did a transformation was when I worked with site directed mutagenesis. I cloned a protein sequence into the p15TVL vector, created my mutants (but that’s another story), and was finally ready for the next step: transformation and expression of my desired protein. Little did I know that my enthusiasm would fall…

troubleshooting thin layer chromatography

Troubleshooting Thin Layer Chromatography: Some TLC for Your TLC

The whole TLC technique sounds easy to do, but it can be difficult and tricky during interpretation or give unexpected results, especially when working with biomolecules. For this reason, it is important to be familiar with troubleshooting thin layer chromatography. Some of the common problems faced during TLC and their solutions are listed below: Solvent…

How to Light Up your Life – Tips and Tricks to Troubleshoot your Luciferase Assay.

What is a luciferase assay and what is it useful for? A luciferase assay takes advantage of the innate bioluminescent properties some organisms exhibit, most notably the firefly. The firefly can convert luciferin to oxyluciferin in the presence of the enzyme luciferase to emit light. The most common scientific assays utilizing luciferase are reporter assays…

How to Troubleshoot Problems with Fluorescently Tagged Proteins
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How to Troubleshoot Problems with Fluorescently Tagged Proteins

Using fluorescent proteins as imaging probes is a widespread and versatile technique in microscopy. You can use them in a wide range of living systems, from single cultured cells to complete organisms and animals. Fluorescently tagged proteins can be used to track and examine real-time localization, interactions and translocation of your protein of interest, as…

DNA isolation

Garbage in, Garbage out? Quality Control of Your NGS Data

So, you’ve just received a call from the core facility that you hired to prepare and sequence your libraries. The facility director tells you that the sequence data from your next generation sequencing (NGS) experiment does not look good. You panic and, perhaps, let loose a scream of frustration—aaarrrrggghhhh! This project was going to be…