In today’s world plastic is all around us and is used for various purposes. Nowadays, a life without plastic seems hard to imagine. An average person living in Western Europe or North America consumes 100 kilograms of plastic each year, mostly in the form of packaging (1). Despite all the advantages, benefits and convenience plastic… Read article →
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is revolutionizing life science research and healthcare. The advent of multiple platforms has opened the doors to increased throughput, speed, sensitivity and flexibility, providing researchers with valuable insights at an unprecedented rate. While recent technological developments have made NGS more accessible to smaller labs, many barriers to implementation still remain. NGS workflows… Read article →
One of the most efficient ways to extract nucleic acids from a sample is to use mechanical force to release them. This is done repeatedly under high speed, until cell walls and membranes are disrupted from the pressure and release their internal contents. In other words, bead beating. Bead beating is a great way to… Read article →
Mechanical and enzymatic lysis both have their drawbacks when isolating genomic DNA from solid tissue samples. While mechanical disruption tends to provide high yields from tissue samples, it does damage the nucleic acids. Enzymatic lysis, like Proteinase K digestion, allows extraction of nucleic acids without damage, but requires long incubation times and provides lower yields… Read article →
There’s a growing trend of irreproducible results in biomedical research. In a previous post, Kurchi Bhattacharya reported on recent studies finding that a surprising number of scientists could not only not reproduce the results of their colleagues, but many found their own results difficult to reproduce as well. Much of the reproducibility problem likely has… Read article →
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