Editorial Articles

The eukaryotic cell has never looked so good. From the pages of scientific journals to the covers of biology textbooks, cells are being captured at their microscopic best, their tightly focused structures awash in shades of fluorescent blues and greens, reds and yellows. For microscopy experts, capturing such images is...

There’s a good chance you don’t know how much of your daily life has been affected by the humble spectrophotometer. An instrument quantifies the absorbance or transmittance of light through a sample placed within the light path inside the spectrophotometer. The light-source wavelengths can be in the ultraviolet (UV), visible (VIS), near infrared (NIR) or infrared (IR) ranges. Bioapplications for spectrophotometry are diverse and include...

In early December 2011, stem cell researchers in the UK celebrated a major achievement as the first ‘clinical grade’ human embryonic stem cell lines were deposited in the UK Stem Cell Bank. While in the past, embryonic stem cells have been...

High content analysis (HCA) is the automated extraction and analysis of cellular images taken during high-resolution light microscopy. Add to this today’s more advanced optical probes and complex bioinformatics, and you have a powerful tool for the bioresearcher asking complex questions. HCA can yield information about...

Not long ago, you had to wait your turn to use a FACS machine in a core facility—now you can have your own cell sorting flow cytometer in your office. Today’s sophisticated technology has made cell analysis better than ever. If you are searching for a flow cytometry system, here are some considerations and examples of the features available...

New low-cost instruments, including Life Technologies’ low-cost Ion Torrent PGM and Illumina’s MiSeq, have made next-gen sequencing a possibility for ordinary labs. Pacific Biosciences garnered worldwide attention by decoding the Vibrio cholerae pathogen that rampaged across Haiti. Meanwhile, in the clinic, human genomes were unraveled with...

It’s generally agreed that the primary factors to consider when choosing cell-based assays should include specificity, sensitivity and ease of use. Most products on the market exemplify more than one, and often all, of these qualities. And a seemingly mundane lab task—washing your sample during the assay—can have a great effect on all three qualities. So another important question to consider...

Many researchers don’t give the plastic labware they use a second thought. But not all plasticware is created equal. How do you go about selecting the right tube or microplate for your experiments? And how can you be sure that...

In 2D gel electrophoresis, protein samples are resolved first by charge, in a step called isoelectric focusing (IEF), and then by size (as in standard SDS-PAGE). The result is an image in which potentially thousands of protein spots are resolved across the gel surface—images that can be studied and compared to see, for instance, how the proteome changes under certain conditions.

If there’s one thing all genome-editing techniques have in common, it’s that they don’t try to reinvent the wheel, molecularly speaking. Rather than devising some new strategy to get cells to implement the desired change, these methods let the cells themselves do the heavy lifting. They leverage natural DNA repair mechanisms...

Marrying modern molecular biology with classical cytogenetics, molecular cytogenetics techniques enable researchers to identify chromosomal abnormalities on a genome scale with finer resolution and at greater frequency than ever before...

Identifying proteins – whether in Western blots or live-cell fluorescent imaging – almost invariably requires an antibody, a protein that binds specifically to one protein or group of proteins. Not all antibodies are alike, however. Monoclonal antibodies are...

What about researchers interested only in the phosphoproteome? Phosphoproteins are a relatively small fraction of all proteins, and even among those, phosphopeptides represent a minority. It’s a question of abundance and stoichiometry: Not every peptide in a phosphoprotein is phosphorylated, and even those that are phosphorylated are rarely...

The ability to run multiplex (also known as or quantitative PCR or qPCR) reactions is a challenging but important endeavor. Not only does it mean higher-throughput, but it also allows researchers to use more than one reference gene for better...

The purification of extracted proteins from a starting sample of cells or tissue sounds simple enough, especially when you’re talking about a total (rather than fractionated) protein sample. But in fact, finding the right total protein extraction kit for the preparation of your sample is not as simple as it seems – especially when...

Suppose you identify a transcription factor that you believe regulates some gene of interest. It’s easy enough to demonstrate this protein is capable of binding the gene’s promoter or operator sequences in vitro—a simple gel-shift assay will do the trick. But how do you prove they interact in vivo...

Although microarrays are an essential microRNA (miRNA) screening tool for many, another tool with a wider dynamic range is gaining on them—real-time PCR. Also known as quantitative PCR (qPCR), this method enables...

Cytokines are vital intercellular communication molecules. These proteins carry signals or messages when they are released from one cell and are subsequently sensed by another cell. Releasing information into the extracellular milieu means dilution of the signal, however. “Sensitivity is always an issue in...

Microplate washers are often not appreciated for the important work they do, because they don't produce the end result of an assay. But their performance can significantly affect that end result. Microplate washers come in the form of strip washers, full plate washers and combination washer-dispensers. They can handle a variety of plate types, including...

Stem cell researchers are getting excited, and with good reason. Methods are emerging to reprogram cells from one type to another and to reprogram adult cells (for example, fibroblasts) into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs)—a state much like embryonic stem (ES) cells—from which they can become any cell type. This is especially important...

There's no shortage of insights that researchers can draw from looking at cells or their components in isolation. Sometimes, though, the biology can only truly be appreciated in its entirety—seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. Enter in vivo imaging, an approach in which biology is studied at...

For all the hype that the genome and (to a lesser extent) proteome receive, when it comes to understanding the biology of disease, development, and differentiation, there's another 'ome to which researchers should pay attention: The metabolome. Metabolomics refers to the study of the complete set of...

Counting cells by eye, with a hemocytometer and a microscope, may be just perfect for some applications. But for many others, especially those that require counting large numbers of cells, automated cell counting is simply more efficient and more accurate. Automated cell counters come with a variety of counting technologies and attributes, but all of them bring to a lab the benefits of . . .

RNA interference (RNAi) – the process of disrupting gene expression such that the gene’s corresponding protein is reduced or “knocked down” – has rapidly become an important gene expression tool since its introduction several years ago. With the widespread use of...

Transfection is still a major bottleneck for many researchers. Primary cells are valued because they more closely model live tissue, but they are difficult to transfect. Successfully completing the challenge of transferring plasmid DNA or RNA into a cell requires careful selection of transfection reagent as well as attention to cytotoxicity and transfection efficiency. An inefficient transfection or high toxicity to the cells can...

One of the gold standards for measuring protein levels in a biological sample is still the tried-and-true Western blot, also known as a protein immunoblot. In Western blotting, proteins are separated according to molecular weight by gel electrophoresis, then transferred from the gel to a blotting...

Perhaps no aspect of life in a modern molecular biology lab is more ubiquitous – or more important -- than cell culture. Cell culture is at the heart of almost every experiment -- the source of every protein, RNA, and genomic DNA sample, of every microscope slide and

Like herds of wild animals, cells migrate from one place to another. While the reasons for cell migration are often unknown, we are gaining a better understanding of migration during normal development, cell growth and differentiation, inflammation, wound healing, and dysfunctions such as cancer metastasis. The special case of...

There is a wide range of applications, including genotyping, SNP analysis, drug target validation, and quantitative gene expression analysis, which require quantification of the amount of DNA in a starting sample. Increasingly, researchers are...

The thermal cycler, or thermocycler, has become a central piece of equipment for many laboratories. Also known as PCR machines, thermal cyclers are devices that use a sample block that can heat and cool rapidly, often using...