DNA / RNA Manipulation and Analysis
Preparing Metaphase Spreads: The Breakdown on Broken-Down Cells
A quick look at the first steps of metaphase spreads – the break down on breaking down your cells and the factors to keep in mind.
Read More Five Ways to Modify Your siRNA for Improved RNAi
Want to increase siRNA stability and efficiency? Read on to learn five chemical modifications that will help.
Read More 3′ mRNA-Seq is Transforming Gene Expression Analysis
3′ mRNA-seq is a NGS method to profile gene expression that is sensitive and straightforward but won’t blow your budget.
Read More Isolating Nucleic Acids From Arabidopsis Seeds (And Other Tough Seeds)
While DNA and RNA extraction is a pretty common technique, it isn’t always the easiest. Read on to learn some top tips on how to successfully extract nucleic acids from even the toughest samples, like Arabidopsis seeds.
Read More How to Isolate DNA from Mitochondria: An Energetic Guide
Mitochondrial DNA isolation can be time-consuming and laborious. Find out how to minimise the time needed for its extraction, while ensuring fantastic results.
Read More miRNA Expression: How to Choose the Right Profiling Platform
When it comes to profiling miRNAs there are lots of platforms available. We discuss the pros and cons of various miRNA profiling methods to help you choose the right one for your needs.
Read More T4 DNA Ligase: The Only Ligase You’ll Ever Need?
T4 DNA ligase is the swiss army knife of ligases, but it can’t always do it all. Find out what it’s good at and the alternatives available for the things it struggles with.
Read More Tips on Restriction Digests: Designing a Restriction Screen
Restriction digests are the cornerstone of many techniques. Here are some great tips on setting up and troubleshooting them.
Read More Ye Olde Antibiotic Plates: Stability of Antibiotic Agar Plates
After a late night transformation you realise you have forgotten to make any plates. Should you use the old stash of amp plates you found in the back of the cold room?
Read More DIY Centrifugation-Based Purification of cfDNA
There are many reasons you may want to study circulating, cell-free DNA (cfDNA) such as non-invasive prenatal testing to generate a molecular karyotype of an unborn fetus or for use in cancer to detect, diagnose and monitor the disease. Qiagen’s QIAamp circulating nucleic acids extraction kit is consistently cited in the scientific literature as the…
Read More What’s The Problem With Ampicillin Selection?
Resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin is commonly used as a selection marker for plasmids in gene cloning and protein expression in E.coli and other bacteria. While it can be incredibly useful tool, there can be problems using this selection marker that you need to be aware of if if you plan on using it. This…
Read More A Beginner’s Guide to How Blunt-End Cloning Works
Blunt and sticky might sound dull and dirty but knowing how these different cloning methods work is important when choosing which method to use. Here we give you a guide to how blunt-end cloning works. Blunt-end cloning is the cloning of DNA fragments containing no unpaired bases at the 5’ and 3’ prime ends (i.e.…
Read More Antibiotics Used in Molecular Biology
Antibiotics are used in a wide range of techniques in molecular biology including molecular cloning and are important for treating pesky mycoplasma contamination in cell cultures. They can also be used to maximize your plasmid yields by reducing protein synthesis, in certain circumstances. The aim with this post is to provide an easy reference to…
Read More Top Tips for Troubleshooting In Vitro Transcription
The Phobia of RNases My first experience of troubleshooting in vitro transcription came when I was synthesizing RNA In-Situ Probes for the first time. A lab mate ominously warned me that I had just returned to lab after a bout of flu and that meant I’m a walking talking factory of RNases. I went ahead…
Read More Faster Ligations: PEGing down the Secret
Overnight ligations are inconvenient — especially when they fail. Luckily, there’s a straightforward way to faster DNA ligations. This article highlights the secret ingredient to faster ligation reactions and offers some tips and caveats on its use. For a general overview of DNA ligations, see here and here. Buy a Quick Ligation Kit The most…
Read More How to Set up Your Elution Experiment
What do DNA mini preps and protein immunoprecipitation experiments have in common? They start differently, but they end with the same, critical stage – elution. But what exactly is elution, and what is the point? The Terminology First, let’s start with some basic terminology: Elution – extracting one material from another by washing with a…
Read More CPEC– a Quick and Inexpensive Cloning Strategy
Cloning Strategies – a Whole Lot of Options to Choose Molecular cloning has come a long way from simple restriction digestion-ligation cloning strategies to a large number of highly efficient alternatives. Broadly classified, cloning techniques can be divided as sequence dependent and sequence independent strategies. Sequence-dependent strategies are based on restriction digestion-ligation techniques or site-specific…
Read More Show Your Molecular TALEN(T)
Introduction Did you know that the idea of using genetic engineering to ameliorate certain human diseases was viewed as ‘science fiction’ only 10 short years ago? While cell mutagenesis studies and genetic knockout experiments were feasible before genetic engineering, they were not very reliable. Indeed, due to the random and imprecise nature of these older…
Read More NGS Target Enrichment Strategies
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has ushered in a new era of understanding of both the inner workings and the function of the genome. NGS allows researchers to look at traits—including diseases—that are linked to differences or mutations in an individual’s genes. Since only about 1% of the human genome constitutes genes that code for proteins, several…
Read More The EMSA – Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
Probing Nucleic Acid-Protein Interactions with EMSA The electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA) is a powerful technique for detecting specific-binding of nucleic acid-protein complexes. Over the past 30 years, EMSA has been the “go to assay” to investigate the qualitative interactions between nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) and nucleic-acid binding proteins. Through the use of radio-labeled…
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