This post was contributed by guest blogger, member of the Addgene Advisory Board, and Associate Director of the Genetic Perturbation Platform at the Broad Institute, John Doench.

A genetic screening project can be a tremendous undertaking, producing a wall of results that can only be described as bigly. But such a project should not be undertaken lightly. Whether executed in arrayed or pooled format there are of course materials costs, regardless of who is paying for them. More importantly, there’s the opportunity cost of your time; an investment of months of your life that may end with little more than an Excel spreadsheet of random numbers that’ll leave you, well, #sad.

This post was contributed by guest blogger, Luke Lavis, a Group Leader at the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Chemistry is Dead, Long Live Chemistry!

The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP) sparked a renaissance in biological imaging. Suddenly, cell biologists were no longer beholden to chemists and (expensive) synthetic fluorophores. Add a dash of DNA with an electrical jolt and cells become perfectly capable of synthesizing fluorophore fusions on their own. Subsequent advances in fluorescent proteins have replicated many of the properties once exclusive to small-molecules: red-shifted spectra, ion sensitivity, photoactivation, etc. These impressive advances lead to an obvious question: In this age of GFP and its ilk, why should cell biologists talk to chemists?

Cancer – a term familiar to almost every person regardless of profession, race, or gender. Almost no other disease receives as many billions of dollars in funding or as much attention collectively from researchers. Scientists, however, have yet to slay the beast. On a global scale, tens of millions of new cancer cases arise and millions of people die from cancer-related complications each year. Despite these grim statistics, new strategies for attacking cancer are yielding promising results in the laboratory, and Addgene is accelerating this research by helping to make new cancer resources easily accessible to the research community.

Read All Our Editor's Choice Blog Posts

The Addgene Blog has had quite the up-tick in views over the month of August - at over 56,000 views, we’ve grown 12% over last month! This was a bit surprising given how many scientists go on vacation in August (for another part of my job, I travel around the country and set up meetings with PIs to discuss the benefits of depositing… you’d be amazed by the number of out of office responses I’ve received). Clearly we have all of our writers to thank for the excellent content they’ve churned out in the last month.

In this two-part series, we sit down to talk with two senior graduate students, Ben Vincent and Niroshi Senaratne, from the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard University to get the scoop on the ups and down of graduate student life. Senior graduate students can sometimes be elusive or have a certain mystique that makes them difficult to approach for the youngster just starting in the lab, but they are exactly the people you should talk to if ruminating the trials and tribulations of the modern PhD program. Don’t be fooled! Most senior graduate students are friendly and full of useful advice. Stay tuned for concrete advice on how to pick a lab and a project.

Listen to Part 2 Here!