No More White Elephants! – Consider this Before Buying a Real-time PCR Cycler

No More White Elephants! – Consider this Before Buying a Real-time PCR Cycler

Does your lab have a closet full of white elephants; once expensive instruments that are no longer fit for purpose, or have broken down? In many cases, all of that wasted money and resource could have been saved if the buyers had made smart choices about matching the instrument more closely to their needs. A…

Do You Know Where You Are? Find Out with Genome Walking

Do You Know Where You Are? Find Out with Genome Walking

Do you work with plants? Are they genetically engineered? Do you know where and how? If not, you could experience problems. After all you do not want your transgenic gene cassette to disrupt genes that would affect your phenotype of interest. In this article I will tell you about Agrobacterium-mediated transformation – a widely used…

Control your error! How to minimize pipetting error and get low SDs in qRT-PCR

Control your error! How to minimize pipetting error and get low SDs in qRT-PCR

Variability is the Achilles’ heel of research. It can often confound our results and lead us astray searching for solutions. There are two kinds of variability, the first is biological variability. This represents the stochastic nature of the sample you are working with and the inherent differences between samples from the same conditions. There is…

Designing Luck: 8 Basic Concepts for Designing Primers for a Standard PCR

Designing Luck: 8 Basic Concepts for Designing Primers for a Standard PCR

I think we all have been through those my-PCR-product-didn’t-get-amplified days. Sometimes, playing around a bit more with the PCR conditions brings luck, or sometimes it doesn’t work at all. These days we have access to many different types of DNA polymerases, ultrapure and buffered nucleoside triphosphates, and other necessary starting materials in convenient concentrations; but…

Detecting Signal in qPCR: From DNA Binding Dyes to BHQ Probes
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Detecting Signal in qPCR: From DNA Binding Dyes to BHQ Probes

A Brief History of Detecting Amplicons The Old Days of Ethidium Bromide In the early 1990s, quantitative (q) PCR was in its infancy, and despite PCR itself already being around for 10 years, there were no easy ways of precisely quantifying the amount of DNA that was amplified in a PCR reaction. In those days PCR…

How to Be Greener – The Environmentally Friendly Guide to PCR

How to Be Greener – The Environmentally Friendly Guide to PCR

Science is an expensive business and those who use high energy-demanding techniques may not even realize just how expensive they are. The Cost of PCR Let’s looks at PCR. You need to pay for the machine, all the ingredients including expensive enzymes, a freezer and a fridge for your ingredients, tubes and caps, not to…

Modify Your Oligos, Modify Your Experiments
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Modify Your Oligos, Modify Your Experiments

If you’ve ever performed PCR, you’re probably already very familiar with DNA oligonucleotides (or oligos). But did you know that these molecules can do so much more than just act as simple primers? You can add a wide range of modifications to your oligos, which may change the stability, binding, solubility and even visibility, to…

Finding Nemo: Understanding Single Cell Isolation and PCR Amplification

Finding Nemo: Understanding Single Cell Isolation and PCR Amplification

Every protocol for single cell PCR can be broken down into two steps. In the first step, the cells are isolated by micromanipulation, laser capture microdissection, flow cytometry, or by direct micropipetting. Next, the genetic material is processed by PCR to amplify your sequence of interest. Here, we’ll go through the different options for isolating…

qPCR: RNA Quality and Why It Matters

qPCR: RNA Quality and Why It Matters

Gene expression analysis plays a pivotal role in a wide range of studies, including biomedical analysis and diagnostics. Of all the methods available for gene expression analysis, quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) is the most rapid, sensitive, and accurate to measure mRNA, and its use in clinical diagnostics is rising steadily. RNA quality entails both purity and…

Understand and Troubleshoot PCR with The BitesizeBio Guide to PCR

Understand and Troubleshoot PCR with The BitesizeBio Guide to PCR

Over the years, I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs in the lab. The latter quite often centering on a failed or plainly weird PCR experiment. As I’ve gone on and become ever more fastidious about my lab practices I’ve realized that the majority of these little calamities were perfectly avoidable. In my…

Polymerase chain reaction-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (PCR-ELISA)

Polymerase chain reaction-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (PCR-ELISA)

As researchers, we are constantly on the lookout for new and improved ways to analyze, detect and quantify our favorite protein or gene. Luckily, we don’t always need to reinvent the wheel! PCR-ELISA is a good example of where two commonly used techniques have been merged together to create a very powerful analytical tool. What…

The History of PCR

The History of PCR

As with some of the greatest discoveries in science, from penicillin to microwave ovens and play-doh, PCR was discovered serendipitously. Thanks to the work of many scientists, including Watson and Crick, Kornberg, Khorana, Klenow, Kleppe (so many K’s…) and Sanger, all the main ingredients for PCR had been described by 1980. Like butter, flour, eggs,…

The different Phases of PCR and Why They Are Important

The different Phases of PCR and Why They Are Important

PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) is a biochemical technique developed by Kary Mullis in 1983 that is used to create large quantities of a sequence of DNA. Since this method of mass-producing DNA was first introduced, it has become significantly less labour intensive, more economical, and more routine. The technique relies on a few key players…