We’ve all either been there or are going to be there – undergraduate students, rotation students, joining a new lab at any career stage, learning a new technique while visiting a lab, or maybe even training on a new technique with a coworker. Being a new trainee (even if you’re ...
You’ve designed the perfect experiment – controls, conditions, and everything in between – now all you need are some of your favorite proteins purified to carry out your plan. With a little thoughtful planning, affinity tags can make protein purification a cinch. Types of ...
I often wonder about the gut-brain axis (admittedly for self-serving reasons – I want to understand my obsession with the combination of chocolate and peanut butter), but it’s an undeniably difficult connection to study on a molecular level. The brain is constantly influenced by ...
If you’re interested in learning a new skill, getting access to equipment you don’t have, or maybe both, a visiting scientist stint may be ideal for you. Here, we will chat about who might want to explore this role, how to seek out such an arrangement, and how to operate once in ...
Calcium is arguably one of the most important metal ions in biology (sodium and potassium are up there too!). Calcium is fundamental to muscle and nerve function, hormone secretion, blood clotting, and as we all know, a structural component of bones and teeth. It is an enzyme ...
For safety and production reasons, multiple plasmids with many components are used to package lab grown viruses. It can be intimidating at first to look at so many plasmid maps and protocols! In reality, there are many shared components across viruses (AAV, lentivirus, etc.) and ...
The calcium is strong here….I can sense it….sound like a plot to an biology scifi movie? Or maybe it’s a biosensor?! You can do more than just ‘sense’ biological compounds and reactions; you can quantify them with biosensors! In this blog we will review the basics of biosensors ...
Viruses have become a regular part of basic biological research as well as clinical therapy. These biological tools are useful because they’re derived from viruses that can infect people, cells, and animals. Some of these viruses are completely inert, but others can cause ...
