Though often modeled in isolation, cells are social creatures. Like a teenager with unlimited texting, they send and receive a steady stream of molecular status updates: OMG, did u smell that carbon source? LOL!!! Those messages are routed intracellularly along signal transduction...
Flip through any biological science journal today and chances are good you'll find at least one fluorescent micrograph. Painted in bright splashes of primary colors—red and green, yellow and blue—such cellular images both inform and amaze, their...
When it comes to animal research, there's no getting around one simple fact: It's expensive. Between care, housing, and feeding, live animals can take a serious bite out of a researchers' bottom line. That's especially true if that researcher is...
It's been nearly 30 years since W. Neal Burnette first coined the term "Western blotting" to describe the electrophoretic transfer of protein gels onto nitrocellulose membranes1, and in many ways the technique remains exactly the same. The gel transfer "sandwich" Burnette describes in detail, for instance, would be...
Among molecular biologists and protein chemists, few techniques get as much play as the Western blot. Used to assess the presence, abundance, or modification state of one or more proteins in a complex mixture, the technique is the...
This presentation reviews how infrared fluorescent methods such as quantitative Westerns, In-Cell Western™ assays, and in vivo imaging are used in cancer research.
Radioactive labels for ligands have long been a part of the biological laboratory repertoire. Radioactivity gives a clear, unmistakeable signal, and its use is relatively straightforward. However, radioactive ligands...
Lab equipment fundamentally comes in two flavors. There's the stuff researchers need to drive their specific projects – mass spectrometers, say, or microarray scanners – and the stuff everyone needs. Large lab or small, academic or commercial, every lab needs a freezer...
There are 518 protein kinases in the human kinome, and each one tells a story. They are stories of cellular communication and developmental checkpoints, of chromatin remodeling and cell fate...
The core of a conventional Western blot is a pair of antibodies which bring together the analyte of interest and a method of detection. Traditionally...
Though there are many ways to detect proteins, the decades-old technique of western blotting remains a protein detection mainstay. “Western blotting is the best way to detect one protein within a mixture of other proteins, if you know what...
When does the next generation of sequencing come to a close, marking the start of a newer one? Though the slower, trusty Sanger sequencing method is still prized for...
In vivo imaging is an optical imaging technique which looks deep into the tissues of living test subjects. Applications for in vivo imaging include tracking grafted stem cells, studying biological signaling networks and pathways, gene expression, angiogenesis, and...
A major problem in the past with DNA and protein gels has been the difficulty in getting good images and data from them. Photographs under white or UV light have proved inadequate for quantification, and the entire process of manipulating the camera and gel, and developing the film is imprecise to say the least. Modern gel documentation systems are designed not only for convenience, but for high accuracy and precision in telling you how much of your target molecule is in the gel, and where it is.
The Odyssey® Infrared Imaging System sweeps away the old paradigms of chemiluminescence and visible fluorescence, and introduces a new standard for Western blot analysis – direct infrared fluorescence detection. Infrared detection gives you the quantitative analysis and wide linear dynamic range that chemiluminescence can’t. Strong and weak bands on the same blot are accurately detected without the uncertainty and inconvenience of multiple exposures, and without spending time in the darkroom. The Odyssey System gives you clear, sharp, reproducible bands without fuzziness or “blowout”. Bands hidden by overexposure with chemiluminescence become clear when imaged with Odyssey.