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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 ...
Originally published Aug 3, 2017 and last updated Apr 6, 2021 by Will Arnold. Introducing NGS in 2017 for all incoming plasmids was a big change for Addgene - we had used Sanger sequencing for quality control for over ten years. Now, thanks to a generous donation by the Hirsh ...
Originally published Feb 6, 2014 and last updated Nov 10, 2020. Now that we know all about antibiotic resistance genes, let’s consider another basic element of any plasmid: the origin of replication/replicon. The replicon is comprised of the origin of replication (ori) and all ...
If you’re cloning a plasmid, you’ll need a way to find the needle in the haystack: the one perfect clone that contains the plasmid you’re looking for out of the many cells that don’t. One way to begin the search is by using selection strategies, where only cells that have gained ...
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 ...
