By Rachel Leeson
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If you’ve ever used Golden Gate Assembly for cloning, you might be familiar with the rules of thumb for designing your overhang sets. But are those rules the best way to design GGA overhang sets, particularly for high-complexity reactions?
Around 20% of human genes have no known function or a poorly defined function (Wood, et al). In the microbial world, approximately 50% of predicted genes have unidentified roles as well (Vanni, et al). Is it true that this many genes are truly dispensable or are the current ...
When performing restriction digests on plasmids at Addgene, we sometimes observe something odd in our uncut DNA control: a band or two appear on an agarose gel at notably higher molecular weights than expected, given the size of the plasmid. This is seen only in the uncut DNA; ...
Promoters control the binding of RNA polymerase and transcription factors. Since the promoter region drives transcription of a target gene, it therefore determines the timing of gene expression and largely defines the amount of recombinant protein that will be produced. Many ...
You’ve committed to the daunting task of finding new factors in your biological system of interest, the so-called “fishing expedition.” Your first question is: to screen or to select? Which method will work best for your scientific question? If you’re thinking, ‘wait, those ...
In a lab, you may have heard the phrase gram negative or positive being used to describe a species of bacteria, but what does it actually mean? What relevance does it have on the structure of a bacteria species and how it can be used in a lab? Here we’ll be talking about the ins ...
We often think of DNA as inert. It generally stays put, which makes it easy to locate in a genome. But there is a type of mobile DNA, called a transposon, that’s a bit hyperactive and likes to jump around from one location in the genome to another. This jumping is what caught ...
