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Search below to delve into the Bitesize Bio archive. Here, you’ll find over two decades of the best articles, live events, podcasts, and resources, created by real experts and passionate mentors, to help you improve as a bioscientist. Whether you’re looking to learn something new or dig deep into a topic, you’ll find trustworthy, human-crafted content that’s ready to inspire and guide you.
If, like many people, you use fluorescent proteins to view your transfection efficiency or your CRISPR gene editing, you can also isolate cells with different expression levels of fluorescent proteins. Here are 5 ways to improve your sorting experiment.
Quantitative PCR (qPCR) uses fluorescent dyes or probes to visualize the amplification of specific DNA sequences as it happens (i.e. in real time). The dyes or probes fluoresce when they bind to newly amplified DNA, and the amount of fluorescence emitted is proportional to the amount of DNA (or mRNA) present in the original sample. By detecting newly synthesized DNA…
Producing lentiviral or retroviral vectors is theoretically fairly straightforward. However, anyone new to viral vector work is usually confronted with vast amounts of confusing information. It seems that anyone who has ever made a lentivirus has their own protocols and is adamant that their method is the best one to follow. In reality, there are…
Is your goal to purify a substantial amount of a specific protein? Do you have a quantity of a molecule that binds your protein of interest? If so, generating a custom affinity matrix may be just the trick you need to purify your protein of interest by affinity chromatography. Customizing your affinity chromatography is an…
Having trouble with your cloning? It might be to do with the DNA gel extraction. Get our top 10 DNA gel extraction tips to help you out.
Retroviral transduction is becoming a popular choice for gene delivery into mammalian cells and has multiple advantages over other techniques. If you decide to start work on this useful technique, here is how you can go about it: Step 0: Obtain permission First and foremost, do you have the permission, authorization, and training to work…
Welcome to the last article in this series! Last, but by no means least, we will look at the importance of plant miRNAs and how they differ from their animal counterparts. When/How Were Plant miRNAs Discovered? Plant miRNAs were first described in 2002, a decade after the seminal miRNA study in the nematode C. elegans…
Have you ever wondered what a cell’s life is like? Do they constantly communicate to each other or do they just go on their own daily business? There is an easier way and it involves super advanced molecular “crayon” technology.
How to Obtain a Purer PCR Product and Reduce Non-specific Amplification Unless you’ve gotten your hands on some miraculously specific primers, amplification of only your target sequence without non-specific amplification can be very challenging. Thankfully, a clever and surprisingly simple solution is at hand! A Quick Recap of the Basics In PCR, you design your…
If you want to know what is going on in the brain of drosophila you can use neurobiology imaging techniques to get a global whole-brain perspective. However, such techniques are slow compared to the rapid nature of the neuronal electrical activity, which may be better studied using Drosophila electrophysiology. Lab techniques are often shrouded in…
Cell Penetrating Peptides (CPPs) are the Trojan Horse of cell biology – an innocuous peptide sequence with the special ability to carry virtually any cargo across the plasma membrane. If you have a special delivery that you don’t want to get lost in transit, CPPs are for you! CPPs are short peptides (typically 5-30 amino…
The resolution of any microscope is related to the numerical aperture of the lens and the wavelength of light used to form the image, and can be calculated using Abbe’s law. This, however, is the ideal situation – the best case scenario. In real life, resolution must be defined in terms of contrast, and there…
Supported lipid bilayers are a very useful tool in many fields of cell and membrane biology. But how easy is it to make them? Bilayers can be made quite reproducibly, once you have found a reliable protocol! However, it can take some time to optimize your technique, so to increase your chances, make sure you…
RNA purification may be a common procedure in molecular biology but it is by far the one that people fear most. Why? Dreaded RNase. It’s everywhere… all over your bench and pipettes, and floating in the air, waiting for the chance to creep into your prep, shred your RNA into nucleotides, and ruin a day’s…
Generating a DNA vector library of single and/or compound mutants for a target protein can be a daunting task. If you’re lucky and work in a well-funded lab, you might outsource this process via gene synthesis. Most of us though, need to do it the old-fashioned way. Traditional QuikChange™ Traditionally, there are many steps you…
People would have said that a USB sequencer not much bigger than a memory stick which could sequence genomes in 50kb+ read-lengths was impossible “’Star Trek’ technology!” Now, that futuristic technology is here.
gif by Kronin Okay not talking about that kind of matrix. But the kind of matrix that is crucial for MALDI (Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization). I talked briefly about MALDI in my last article, Imaging Mass Spectrometry: The New(ish) Kid on the Block. Now I want to tell you more about MALDI, specifically the matrix….
One of the much sought after question asked by many researchers worldwide is – “What is the gene expression profile of a single cell within a heterogenous pool of cells?” While mass cytometry is the current ‘hot’ methodology for single cell analysis, the good old flow cytometry can help us perform rapid analysis of single…
ECL can be an expensive reagent in a lab. Why not make your own? Hopefully, this quick, simple and cheap solution will be of help to you!
Want to save money on one of the most expensive steps of your Western blots? Then, use less antibody for significant cost savings!
Are you stuck in cloning hell?, Tired of doing ligations that don’t work? Want a faster, more efficient cloning procedure? You should try ligation independent cloning. A growing number of researchers swear by ligation independent cloning methods because they are simpler and more efficient than conventional cloning and as a recent convert to their ranks,…
The word ‘retrovirus’ evokes images of HIV, the AIDS pandemic and a desperate worldwide effort to defeat this mighty adversary. But on the flip side, scientific research has managed to tame the virus and use it as a tool for advancement. Retroviruses are commonly used to introduce genes into mammalian cells to express or knockdown…
RNA sequencing (Wang 2009) is rapidly replacing gene expression microarrays in many labs. RNA-seq lets you quantify, discover and profile RNAs. For this technique, mRNA (and other RNAs) are first converted to cDNA. The cDNA is then used as the input for a next-generation sequencing library preparation. In this article, I’ll give a brief…
I’ve noticed that there exists some ambiguity about the different terms relating to homology. I’ll try to break them down here, with significant help from Genome Biology.
In real life, cells are instructed to commit suicide for the greater good of the organism. The programmed cell death (apoptosis) is important during development of a multi-cellular organism. A good example you will appreciate is the dis-appreance of the tail from a tadpole as it turns into a frog. On the reverse, the lack…
Hope you had a heavy breakfast, because the first qPCR is going to take time. Did you remember to fill your coffee cup? There are a lot of intricacies in qPCR that will need your neural networks to be brisk. How qPCR differs from traditional PCR Unlike traditional PCR, qPCR measures the amplification of DNA…
If you do cell culture you will inevitably need to count your cells. Counting cells can be tedious, but it is important to do accurately. Your assessed quantity of living cells will affect all your downstream applications. In this article I will not only cover how to manually count your cells and how to do…
As biochemists, we routinely run SDS-PAGE to analyze our proteins. Imagine the time and effort you are going to save when you can run every gel to perfection.
Are you an assiduous biologist who prefers label-free imaging methods for biological samples analysis? Raman spectroscopy offers you a wonderland of imaging technique with unlimited benefits. To start with, Raman Spectroscopy is a spectroscopic technique based on inelastic scattering of monochromatic light usually from a laser in the visible or near infra-red part of electromagnetic…
While most of us have heard of super resolution microscopy, many of you may not have heard of MSIM, or Multifocal Structured Illumination Microscopy. This under-the-radar imaging technique is relatively quick, cheap (by comparison) and will allow you to get a lot of data, fast. So What is MSIM Anyway? MSIM, as I mentioned earlier,…
Some tissues are tricky to work with. This truth was lost on me in the early years of grad school because I worked with liver samples. If you’re extracting RNA from liver samples, you’re likely not losing sleep over your massive RNA yields. But for the folks doing RNA extractions with less willing donors, such…
Now you’ve got great sequencing results, thanks to Nick’s article on improving sequencing results. Now what? Well now you need some software (preferably free) to analyze your data. BioEdit is a good option. But what I have to offer today is a much lighter and equally handy tool. It’s called Artemis and was developed by…
In the sci-fi novel Terminal World by Alistair Reynolds, a planet consists of zones with defined characteristics of matter interactions on a subatomic level. These conditions permit different levels of technology sophistication in various zones. For example, in the “Steamville zone” nothing more complicated than steam engines works – electronic schemes fuse irreversibly. Something like…
Like most other chromatographic techniques, thin layer chromatography (TLC) separates out individual compounds from a mixture depending upon the polarity of each compound. The solvent system travels up a silica plate by capillary action and passes over the sample that you spot onto the plate. As the solvent travels up, it moves the compounds present…
Wow, you’ve done it! Your experiment worked and your boss asked you to write it up for publication in your favorite journal. Where to start with presenting your flow data? Take a deep breath, help is in hand in the form of the MIFloCyt Guidelines. As with other scientific techniques, there are ‘Minimum Information about…
If you’ve read our article, An Overview of Yeast Two-Hybrid (Y2H) Screening, you’ll know that one major limitation of conventional Y2H is that your protein-protein interaction must occur in the nucleus for the reporter gene to be activated. So what do you do if your protein is a receptor tyrosine kinase? Or a G protein–coupled…
Most eukaryotic proteins exist as several isoforms, differing in posttranslational modifications, which allows them to perform slightly different functions or the same function under slightly different conditions. A common posttranslational modification of proteins is glycosylation.
Mastering a new topic cannot be done without mastering the vocabulary first. Last month in Illustrated Optical Fiber Glossary (A – E) I got you started. This month I will cover F through M in my Illustrated Optical Fiber Glossary. Fabry-Perot (FP) Generally refers to any device (e.g., laser diode) that uses mirrors in an…
Taking publication quality immunofluorescent images of can be a very time intensive, and frustrating process with hours spent capturing, processing, and putting the images into final figure format. And, if you aren’t careful, you can do a lot of work only to realize later that you need to re-image something for one reason or another….
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