By Jennifer Tsang
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One of the main tenets of our quality control (QC) mantra is to do our utmost to ensure that scientists are receiving the exact materials that they think they are. To address this, several years ago we partnered with Seqwell to establish a next-generation sequencing (NGS) QC ...
Science is a global endeavor, and that can often mean that scientists who live across the country or around the world from each other are collaborating on projects. When I was a graduate student, I led a collaborative project between my lab in Pennsylvania and a team in Paris, ...
Originally published Aug 30, 2018 and updated April 16, 2020. Sensitive and specific nucleic acid detection is crucial for clinical diagnostics, genotyping, and biotechnological advancements. Many methods of nucleic acid detection however, either lack the sensitivity or the ...
This post was contributed by Manon Eckhardt and Melanie Brewer from the QBI Coronavirus Research Group at UCSF. It’s been only a few months since we all became acutely aware of the threat of SARS-CoV-2. Like many in the science community, we’ve been motivated to do anything and ...
Originally published Jan. 14, 2014 and updated Apr. 14, 2020. Any newcomer who joins a molecular biology lab will undoubtedly be asked to design, modify, or construct a plasmid. A plasmid is a small circular piece of DNA found in bacterial cells, and someone new to plasmids may ...
Plasmid incompatibility is defined as the inability of different plasmids to be maintained in one bacterial cell. In this Plasmids 101 post, we’ll cover why this happens, how it might affect your work, and how understanding it can be used for good. First, why are plasmids ...
As with DNA isolation, scientists commonly rely on RNA isolation kits to make their life easier. Recently, we published a blog on DNA purification without a kit that outlined several reasons why doing something without a kit has advantages: less plastic waste, less expense, and ...
