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This post was contributed by guest blogger, Dalila Cunha de Oliveira.

Bricking Science is an idea built, literally, 'brick-by-brick' to introduce people all around the world to the lives of researchers and PhD students.

Everybody in science knows that there are many ways your experiments can go wrong. Whether it be a bad fridge freezing your samples, or a dysregulated water bath boiling your experiments, just about anything can disrupt your bench work and sometimes no culprit can be found…. In our lab we call this mysterious source of failure the lab gnome.

It’s nearing the end of #DepositorWeek at Addgene and we’d like to show our gratitude on the blog by highlighting some of the great posts written by Addgene depositors. Below you’ll find brief summaries of several excellent guest posts from our depositors. Interested in writing your own post for the Addgene Blog? Fill out our guest blogger form to get started!

Thanks for all your hard work!

This post was contributed by Kurt Swanson a structural biologist and protein engineer currently working at Sanofi Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA.

When I joined Sanofi/Genzyme nearly three years ago I decided it was time to get in shape. After three kids, I had put on typical middle age weight and “exercise” consisted of taking walks in the mall. I took action, joined a gym, and started running on a treadmill. After being with the company for about six months, I learned there was a Genzyme-based running team called Running for Rare Disease that runs on behalf of the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD). NORD raises money and awareness for rare disease and helps patients find the correct treatments, if available. As part of the team, I started adding mile after mile on my poor, poor legs.

This post was contributed by guest blogger, Krissy Lyon, a PhD candidate in Neuroscience at Harvard University.

Just as computers, cell phones, and cars become more technologically advanced leaving earlier versions obsolete, the techniques we use in lab are replaced by improved versions that save both time and money. Yet, knowledge of historical techniques comes in handy whether you are perusing classic papers or are brainstorming new technological innovations. Let’s take a look at three historical techniques: southern blotting, restriction mapping, and sequencing gels, as well as their modern equivalents and see what we can learn from their evolution.

We’ve dug into the data from our repository to find our most requested plasmid in 2015. In line with all of the exciting developments surrounding CRISPR genome engineering in the past year, we're excited to announce that the plasmid most requested from the Addgene repository in 2015 was...