Featured Articles

The landscape of cell culture looks much more vibrant these days. Gone is the bland horizon of a few traditional formulations. Now that scene most resembles a multicolored tableau of options that suit a multitude of uses and cell types. While classic reagents and tools still pervade laboratory shelves, the newest products provide...

Imagine if you could peer into the proteome of your child and see raised warning flags denoting the future development of various diseases. Hopefully there would be something you could do to prevent those maladies. We can’t yet do all of this, but we are making progress on using proteins as biomarkers for...

Automation used to be found in only the largest biotech and pharmaceutical laboratories. Today, however, it is part of the workflow in all types of laboratories: small and large, academic as well as industrial. Whether you use an automated system for...

How long should it take to count molecules that you can’t see? Slowly and steadily, the process is getting faster, more efficient, and more accurate. Real-time PCR (or quantitative PCR, qPCR) is a method of quantifying the amount of DNA in...

When pathologists receive tissue specimens for microscopic examination, they have two options. They can encase the tissue in ice, or, they can fix it with formalin and embed it in paraffin. Both processes achieve the same goal – producing a solid tissue block from which...

The power to see inside cells, inside organelles, even to see individual molecules, is growing at an alarming rate. Cellular imaging is changing rapidly, according to Scott Olenych, consultant at Carl Zeiss MicroImaging. “New techniques are becoming available to address the questions of researchers in new and...

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...

Autophagy – literally, eating oneself ¬– is a crucial recycling function in cells whereby they rid themselves of intracellular matter such as protein and organelles. Though it may sound like a routine housekeeping function, autophagy also plays a role in mechanisms of...

Spectrophotometry is a technology that has long been considered mature, and advances in instrumentation tend to focus on fine-tuning the technical details, such as...

Kinases are finally getting the recognition they deserve. Yes, there are a lot of them -- and they are essential for normal cellular functioning. However, there remains a relative dearth of information about their seemingly endless...

Genotyping can be accomplished using a number of different tools, including PCR, sequencing or hybridization to microarrays or beads. Which tool you choose will depend...

What you need is a peptide, but not just any peptide, a specific peptide -- your specific peptide. Whether that peptide is short or long, contains unadulterated amino acids or...

As more and more new assays are successfully adapted for high throughput screening, the overall range of microplate-based assays has become broader. In addition to traditional fields such as molecular biology, proteomics, and drug discovery and development, microplate instrumentation is showing up in...

There's no denying the small, non-coding regulatory molecules called microRNAs are hot. Implicated everywhere from floral development to oncogenesis, microRNAs account for 6500 references in PubMed, all but a few hundred of them...

Gene expression studies have deepened our understanding of important cellular functions. However, they often assume that cells of a particular type are homogeneous – and this is not necessarily the case. “Just like people, even genetically identical cells...

Protein expression, once the province of specialized proteomics laboratories, is now a versatile tool used in many disciplines within the life sciences. Advances in genomics have generated increased interest in functional...

Have you worked in a lab long enough to remember taking a Polaroid shot of your gel, and taping it into your lab notebook? Gel documentation has since become much more...

As the technology landscape shifts, needs in the area of PCR cloning are shifting with it. Next generation sequencing platforms are displacing PCR cloning applications for sequencing, and there is a greater need for vectors able to clone...

Don't look now – actually, do! – but something may be lurking in your cell culture. Microscopically invisible, impervious to most common antibiotics, and causing no obvious changes to your culture media, a bacterial contaminant may be covertly wreaking havoc...

Taq DNA Polymerase, an enzyme that catalyzes the incorporation of dNTPs into DNA, is one of the most commonly used polymerases in molecular biology. Though it lacks proofreading ability, and other polymerases have since been...

Let’s face it: cells simply didn’t evolve to live in isolation, or even in monolayers, in little plastic dishes. How relevant are our experiments on primary cells or cultured cell lines? While we are far from answering this question completely, we do know...

The use of cell culture in clinical drug development is increasing rapidly due to the advancement of high content analysis techniques and increased large biomolecular therapies. Cell culture consumable requirements for clinical development are more rigorous than for pure research, and a few areas of unmet need remain. These needs include improved plates and wells...

Nanotechnology: the science of small. Can you imagine nanocars that drive with rotating buckyball wheels, delivering drugs or other reagents to specific parts of your brain? Though this isn’t possible yet, it is a scenario whose time will come. Already, nanotechnology researchers can design...

Some applications call for DNA – genotyping and sequencing, say – and some call for RNA (e.g. Northern blots). But some applications call for a mix. Transcript cloning and sequencing, expression analysis – these applications require as input DNA stand-ins for...

Customer service and support can make a crucial difference in otherwise comparable products and technologies. When the products serve the scientific research market, customer service takes on a new meaning. Not only do customers require guidance in using and troubleshooting...

When you want to do an important task carefully, it’s best to slow down, right? Not if you’re an automated instrument that handles liquid samples in a lab. Research is demanding faster liquid handling systems, especially for screening...

The entire foundation of modern molecular biology is predicated on a single supposition: That it is possible to deliver nucleic acids to cells. From reporter gene assays to RNAi, knockout mice to...

How many cells are in your sample? There are a number of different ways to answer that question, from manual counting through a microscope to sophisticated flow cytometry instrumentation. With cell number becoming...

Beam me up, Scotty? We’re not quite there yet, but today scientists are using lasers to cut, capture, and even catapult single cells and pieces of tissue. Laser capture microdissection (LCM) uses inverted or upright microscopes, ultraviolet (UV) or infrared (IR) lasers, and tissue from...

RNAi technology has advanced far beyond the speculative phase, and researchers are looking for higher quality siRNA in greater quantities and wider gene coverage than ever before. Much of the spike in demand comes from RNA interference drug screens for drug target identification or validation. Large scale screens often follow...