With the meteoric rise of CRISPR technology, the ability to direct enzymes – from nucleases to transcription factors – to specific sequences of DNA has become commonplace. This ability has opened up a world of possibilities in the engineering of complex gene networks. A ...
Nicola Patron is Head of Synthetic Biology at the Sainsbury Laboratory, where she often feels more like an engineer than a biologist. Their focus at the lab is on plant-pathogen interactions, and her aim is to produce constructs and edit genomes so as to make plants, and ...
This post was updated on Dec 4, 2017. At Addgene, we continually use the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) provided by NCBI. BLAST helps us compare the sequencing results of the plasmids in our repository with known reference sequences, such as full plasmid sequences ...
Although plasmids do not naturally exist in mammals, scientists can still reap the benefits of plasmid-based research using synthetic vectors and cultured mammalian cells. Of course, these mammalian vectors must be compatible with the cell type they are tranfected into – a ...
In our first few Plasmids 101 posts, we focused mainly on the elements required for plasmid maintenance within an E. coli cell, but vectors can be widely utilized across many different cell types and each one requires different elements for vector propagation. This post, along ...
There are no universal rules for naming plasmids but here are some good guidelines to follow in order to ensure that people can quickly and easily identify what your plasmid contains and other important information.
Resistance to antibiotics is a widely used tool in molecular biology, yet scientists rarely stop to think about how much easier it makes our lives. Plasmid transformation into E. coli is a fairly inefficient process– just 1 out of 10,000 cells on average! Without some means of ...
We perform over 100 transformations each week at Addgene, so we need to be cost and time efficient. We do this by making our own competent cells and using a little-known reagent for streamlining the transformation step. Read on to find protocols and tips that you can use in your ...
