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Lentiviruses, particularly those based on HIV, have an important advantage over other types of retroviral expression systems. They can transfect both dividing and nondividing cells. This reduces a major source...

Finding the right transfection reagent is a key step in your cell-based expression studies. You need a reagent that will effectively deliver your construct without causing cellular changes that could interfere with the interpretation of your results. In addition to these essentials, it’d be nice...

Sample management software has become a must-have for large and small laboratories. When you are talking about precious resources and valuable person hours, it is no longer acceptable to keep track of samples by memory, or by a piece of paper scotch-taped...

Seeing is believing, and reporter genes allow you to do exactly that: see your gene through association with a gene that is visible, usually through the production of light (e.g. luciferase) or fluorescence (e.g. GFP). Tagging your gene of interest to a reporter gene, delivering that construct...

Try this thought exercise: Imagine you're blindfolded, and asked to identify the object someone puts into your hand. The object is a bottle filled with jellybeans. Given its texture, weight, and shape, you probably can surmise you've been handed a bottle. But what are its contents? To figure that out...

Sometimes scientists—especially those who spend long days in the lab—forget that many nonscientists find the notion of wrestling with an animal’s basic characteristics more than a little disturbing (see Frankenstein). Direct tinkering with genetic codes...

Remember Beer's Law? If not, don't worry. Even though it is the cornerstone of the principles to spectrophotometry, today's spectrophotometers are sophisticated enough to ensure you hardly ever have to use it. With the simple knowledge that...

Imagine the looks on Watson and Crick’s faces if you had told them about DNA microarrays while they were solving DNA’s structure – probably just as shocked as we would be now if...

Delivering nucleic acid into your cell of interest is the first step in many experiments, from siRNA studies to reporter gene assays to protein expression. Or perhaps your application requires the transfection of protein into your cells. Either way, the goal is to get your...

Never before have cell biologists had so many tools to help them see what’s happening in and around their cells in real time. Even imaging novices can find live cell imaging accessible today with the quickly emerging...

In vivo imaging is becoming an increasingly valuable tool. And while you surely need the right imaging system for your research, you also need the right dyes. After all, the image you produce can only be as good as the dye you are looking at. When choosing...

For weary scientists who desperately want to fit a few more hours into their workday, help is on the way. It's not a cloning machine, but the next best thing—personal automation. Laboratory automation systems have revolutionized sample handling and screening in high throughput laboratories, but automation solutions for the small laboratory or individual...

One of the most critical steps in developing a robust and specific PCR is designing good primers. For specificity, you’ll want to check your primer sequence with BLAST searches. For robustness, you’ll want to make sure your primers don’t form hairpins and your primer pairs...

At the heart of immunohistochemistry (IHC) lies the ability to see things that we couldn’t see with just our eyes, and the ability to detect the locations of these things with some degree of precision. Though it sounds...

Tagging your protein provides a great handle for purification. Once you’ve expressed your tagged protein, the purification scheme you use will depend upon the tag you’ve chosen and the experiments you have planned with your purified protein. The tag (e.g. 6X-His, Strep, GST) will determine...

MicroRNA is one of the most exciting areas of science today. These puckish molecules seem to hold the key to many of the previously locked doors of science, such as embryonic development. Interest in microRNA has expanded beyond the original circles—cancer and...

Formalin and paraffin are great allies when it comes to tissue preservation, but when it comes to extracting viable RNA, they may become your greatest enemies. The multitude of precious samples...

We recycle—so why shouldn't our cells? In fact, they do recycle cellular materials through the process of autophagy. Autophagy is a catabolic process in which a cell degrades...

If when you think of contract services, you think of big projects and big money, think again. There are a myriad of services available to take you through a critical step in your research, allowing you to then...

Every time you transfer liquid from one vessel to another, you incur more error in its volume. Yet many experiments today include multiple transfers of liquid samples in protocols fraught with opportunities for...

Take a gene, or a protein, or a synthetic compound, and ask, “How does this fit into my research? What does it interact with?” Or, start with a given pathway and ask, “What feeds into it? What inhibits it, and how?” Pathway analysis tools give the scientific community answers to...

As the number of applications for siRNA knockdown continues to grow, so does the number of siRNA transfection reagents. Whether your own siRNA knockdown needs are for basic research in cultured cells or for more clinically-based applications using...

How many ways can you kill a cell? This is an open question, whose answers shed light on many different areas of cell and molecular biology, and immunology. “Cytotoxicity is a multi-faceted phenomenon that plays a role in a wide range of...

The first microscope you peered through was likely a basic light microscope, perhaps one that had been beat up on by 4200 biology students before you. When you peered through the oculars, you saw...

For his 2007 study of insulin signaling targets in Caenorhabditis elegans, Scripps Research Institute professor John Yates III used two techniques to quantify changes in the abundance of several different proteins over time. One was...

Gene silencing has matured in the past few years from a novelty to a solid laboratory method, much like gene knockouts or SNP mapping. As we all know, with maturity comes wisdom, and perhaps a few wrinkles. In the case of gene silencing, wrinkles come in...

If you’d rather not pack your own chromatography columns, then don’t! Prepacked columns are available for a wide array of applications and sample sizes. There’s no need to prepare...

Like all scientific fields struggling against limits of resolution imposed by technology or instrumentation, single-cell analysis, too, is having growing pains. Among them number such issues as...

RNA purification is an early and important step in numerous types of experiments. Whether you will be using your RNA to perform real-time PCR, generate cDNA for expression cloning, create probes for microarray analysis or any...

Who wouldn’t want to run more experiments simultaneously? You save time, money, and hassle, while ensuring that more samples see the same experimental conditions. Increasingly, scientists are using multiplexing technologies to...