Blogs

When I was first introduced to acrylamide gels way back in Fundamentals of Biology, I did not have the privilege of assembling the reagents. But I can remember just loading the gel was intimidating at first, trying to maneuver the fine tip between the plates and hopefully into the barely distinguishable wells of the gel. In the first technique class in SCF's Biotechnology program (nicknamed 'The DNA Class') I developed a false sense of security with gels. Because we mostly handle DNA, the gels that were made and ran in that class were aragrose gels. In my opinion, agarose gels... Read more

Judith Fitzpatrick shared this interesting summary from a workshop that she organized for the ATE PI conference.

This workshop was convened because the recent emphasis on entrepreneurial and research based ATE projects is beginning to yield significant intellectual property, i.e. copyright and patents. The panel consisted of Ned Isralesin, a practicing patent attorney, Patricia Campbell, Director, Maryland Intellectual Property Legal Resource Center at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Dorian Grumet, Director of Licensee Relations and Compliance at the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) at Rutgers University. There was considerable interest discussion of the... Read more

My lab partner, Allison, and I have been assured that troubleshooting is a desired skill and that we will be grateful for our current Proteins woes later in our careers. And I'm proud to say that despite repeated setbacks, we've put our big-girl lab coats on, looked that ?-galactosidase in its ornery eye, and paraphrased the words of the incomparable "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in the best B movie ever, They Live:

"We have come here to chew bubblegum and purify proteins... and we're all outta bubblegum."

A run-down of the problems we've encountered and the ferreted out causes:... Read more

What an amazing time! I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the 2013 ATE Principal Investigators Conference and I'm grateful to be able to share the experience here! There's just so much to share, I thought it best to do a time line in pictures:

We arrived in Washington D.C. at noon on a Wednesday and hustled over to the Omni Shoreham hotel where the conference was being held:

Seriously, I think I'm gonna like it here.

Hustle is... Read more

Biotechnology students Desirey Flores and M. Clayton Speed won cash awards along with 2 nd and 1 st place in the undergraduate poster competition during the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) conference on November 1, 2013, held in New Orleans, LA. Ms. Flores presented a poster entitled "Investigating the Role of 53BP1 in DNA Repair" and M. Clayton presented "Investigating the Role of DNA Repair Enzymes in Replication Associated Damage in Osteosarcoma and Micro-Cell Culture Lines." There were over 140 student presenters attending the meeting. Read more

Biotech students Molly Robertson and M. Clayton Speed were awarded Student Awards for Excellence by the National Science Foundation in October 24, 2013.

The awards were based on DNA repair research the students performed at the Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. The award ceremony was held in Washington DC. Read more

Hello, my name is Kristine and I'm currently enrolled in State College of Florida's Biotechnology program. I have always been in love with science and remember watching documentaries and television shows wanting to work in the labs that the actors/featured scientist were in. I thought in order to get to work in such a place you needed to go to Harvard or some high class university first.

When I started my journey back to school I was working as a certified nursing assistant (CNA), and majoring in nursing. CNA's are the low man on the health care... Read more

The October 2013 edition of Bio-Link Connections is now available! Visit our newsletter page to download your copy and learn more about the wonderful things that Bio-Link programs are doing across the country and sharing with each other. Read more

If it's one thing I've learned in my technique classes is that there is a lot of 'hurry up and wait' procedures. Working with proteins is definitely no exception.

For the past month or so my protein class has been working on purifying bacterial alkaline phosphatase (BAP). Rewinding back to day one of the process, we received our bacteria that had already been induced so our first step was to lyse the cells. Method used for lysing = sonication. I have to admit, this is my least favorite method for lysing cells. The sound of the sonicator... Read more

This story just cracked me up! Gel photography with a cell phone? Can it work?

So here's what happened:

In Mo Bio we've been working on cutting the pAMP we purified from our super sweet transformed E. coli JM 109 cells with BamH I and Hind III and then electrophoresing to compare our results against negative and positive controls to see how we did. But after bathing the gels in ethidium bromide we discovered - eeek! - no photography paper. So we tried taking pictures with our phone:

But we couldn't get the furthest and... Read more