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As we mentioned a few months ago, Addgene has been working with Seeding Labs to provide plasmid grants to researchers in developing countries. Today we’re proud to announce that we’ve selected our first two plasmid grant awardees: Drs Louis Bengyella and Kwabena O. Duedu, both from the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ghana. Read on to learn more about doctors Bengyella and Duedu and how they plan to use plasmids from Addgene to advance their research.

Addgene will be at the American Society for Microbiology Microbe meeting here in Boston next week - be sure to come by booth #851 and say hello! Just in time for this meeting, Addgene is launching a new resource page for the Microbiology community. On our new curated Microbiology Collection page, you can browse for plasmids by species and find our guides, plasmid kits and other resources for microbial research.

THE ORIGINAL NgAgo ARTICLE DISCUSSED IN THIS POST HAS BEEN RETRACTED AND FOLLOW UP STUDIES HAVE FAILED TO REPEAT THE RESULTS DISCUSSED BELOW

Biologists are going gaga over the newest gene-editing protein - a DNA-cleaving Argonaute from Natronobacterium gregoryi, or NgAgo for short. Addgene has already distributed this plasmid all over the world, and the question on everyone’s minds is: could NgAgo replace CRISPR? Such a drastic shift won’t happen overnight, but there are a few reasons why you might choose NgAgo over CRISPR proteins Cas9 or Cpf1 - keep reading to learn more!

We’ve all had the feeling where it seems like we’re the only one in the room who doesn’t know about an important scientific principle.

Example Scenario

Important science person: ...and then we found out that it wasn’t a deoxynucleotide, it was a dideoxynucleotide!

Room full of important science people: (laughter in unison)

You: (nervous laughter)

This blog post was contributed by guest blogger Kate Palozola

Traditional lab notebooks just won't cut it for bioinformatics. All kinds of biologists are finding themselves using computational approaches to analyze large data sets (myself included) and we are faced with finding the best system to document these types of analyses and their results. We are adept at recording wet-lab experiments using a “traditional” lab notebook; however, keeping track of computation work comes with new sets of challenges. One challenge with computational analyses is to keep track of why you are doing what you are doing. Another common challenge is to keep track of what works, and what does not work. Careful documentation will keep you on task and will prevent you from getting lost in the wide word of informatics.