All Posts

This post was contributed by guest blogger Stephanie Hays, a researcher at the University of California Berkeley.

It’s been half a year since the march for science on April 22, 2017. While experiments (and editors) can move slowly, news about possible broad changes to policies seems to break everyday. Many researchers and supporters of science marched to advocate for scientist participation in government, evidence to inform policies, a protected place to work, funding for science, and numerous other reasons. It is important to remember that we, scientists and non-scientists alike, need to stay active and involved if we wish to make positive change. Below I present perspectives on the March for Science from researchers all over North America. I hope that these perspectives, the optimism they encapsulate, and the solutions they promote help motivate you to spend a little time advocating for science and getting yourself out there for the next six months and beyond.

Disclaimer: The views represented below are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the views of Addgene.

This post was contributed by guest blogger Katrin Michel.

Cre-lox is an incredibly popular and powerful site specific recombinase (SSR) system, but it only gives you a single level of control without modification - either Cre is there or it’s not. Cre-mediated possibilities for site specific (and often cell type specific) control of DNA recombination and gene expression can be advanced by the coordinated use of fellow SSR system FLP-FRT. In addition, a variety of means to spatiotemporally control FLP and Cre expression have been developed. Read on to learn more about FLP-FRT, Cre-lox, and how combinations of FLP and Cre enable additional levels of genetic control.

In this post in the Careers in Science Communication blog series, you’ll learn about Caitlin Runne-Janczy, a Product Development Manager at eScience Labs, an educational company that creates hands-on science lab kits and digital curriculum to support them. Caitlin’s interview is broken into two parts, with part one detailing how she got into scicomm and part two focusing on what her job at eScience Labs is like. Find all the posts in this series here.

This post was contributed by Tim Herman, director of the MSOE center for BioMolecular Modeling and the CEO of 3-D Molecular Designs.

Have you ever held your favorite protein in the palm of our hand? Well, actually – have you ever held a model of your favorite protein in your hand? At 3D Molecular Designs, we create physical models of proteins using 3D printing technology. The tagline for our company is “…where molecules become real”.  We sometimes forget that the models we create are around 30 million times larger than the real thing. Nevertheless, the models are compelling, and I encourage you to hold one.

Since the discovery of GFP over 50 years ago, the growing spectrum of fluorescent proteins (FPs) has been an invaluable resource for studying the organization and function of cellular systems. FPs have been used to track protein localization, cell structure, intracellular trafficking, and protein turnover rates. Additionally, by engineering FP fusions associated with cellular organelles, scientists have been able to study many cellular processes, including mitosis, mitochondrial fission/fusion, nuclear import, and neuronal trafficking. Although FPs have enabled discovery of many cellular mechanisms, there are some limitations to working with FPs. Overexpression of fluorescently tagged proteins can lead to improper protein localization, protein aggregation, or disruption of normal protein function, and ultimately misinterpretation of the protein’s cellular role.