Hopefully you know that, if you’re an academic researcher at a nonprofit institution, you can order plasmids covering a wide range of fields from Addgene. What you might not know is that Addgene distributes curated collections of plasmids as kits with greatly reduced costs per plasmid. We generally create kits to allow you to easily use a set of plasmids together on a tight budget.

This post was contributed by guest blogger, David T. Riglar

Advocating for Science Symposium and Workshop 2016 – Sept 16-17 MIT, Boston

The Advocating for Science Symposium and Workshop, organized by Future of Research, Academics for the Future of Science, and the MIT Graduate Student Council will be held on Friday 16th and Saturday 17^th September respectively. Join us to discuss advocacy efforts toward positive change in the scientific enterprise and the way it is funded and to learn tangible skills necessary for affecting change. On Friday, the symposium includes a panel discussion and keynote by former congressman and CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Rush Holt, followed by a networking reception. Saturday’s workshop will be an advocacy skills “bootcamp” for a focused group of participants. More information can be found at http://futureofresearch.org/advocating-for-science-boston-2016/.

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.