As we look back on 2025, it’s clear that this year brought incredible innovation, practical solutions, and inspiring stories from labs around the world. From cutting-edge cellular imaging to behind-the-scenes looks at manufacturing, our readers showed us what matters most: tools that work, science that inspires, and stories that connect us to the bigger picture.
Here are the five most popular blogs from 2025:
Continue reading “Your Science in Review: Our Top Blogs of 2025”This blog is guest-written by Lucy Kneeley, a 2025 recipient of the Promega International Internship Scholarship. The scholarship is granted annually to University of Wisconsin-Madison students traveling abroad for internship opportunities.
Last summer, I completed an internship at the Institute of Science Tokyo in the lab of Professor Satoshi Kaneko. As someone who has never been out of the United States for more than a 10-day vacation, I gained a lot of valuable communication experience by navigating a language barrier, but more importantly, across different social norms. Immersing myself in a new country with a new language and culture has led me to think differently and realize how quickly a group of strangers can become a new community. By the end of the three months, I had formed a network of colleagues and friends at the university and within the local community.
Continue reading “From Mt. Fuji to the Lab Bench: A UW-Madison Student’s Summer in Japan”This blog was written by guest contributor Tian Yang, Associate Product Manager, Promega, in collaboration with Kristin Huwiler, Manager, Small Molecule Drug Discovery, Promega.
During the development of chemical probes or small-molecule drugs, compound affinity (Kd) or potency (IC50) is used to characterize compound-target interactions, to guide structure-activity relationship analysis and lead optimization and to assess compound selectivity.
However, neither parameter provides information on how quickly a compound engages with and dissociates from the target. The dissociation constant Kd reflects the relative concentrations of unbound and bound state of the compound at thermodynamic equilibrium, and while IC50 is an empirical metric that measures the concentration at which a biochemical or cellular process is reduced to half of the maximum value, IC50 values are typically determined when the process is assumed to be at equilibrium or steady-state. For a closed system, like cells in a culture dish, these thermodynamic parameters are quite informative. In an open system like the human body, where compound-target interactions often do not reach equilibrium, the kinetic parameters, in addition to the thermodynamic parameters, are needed to better understand and characterize compound target engagement over time (1,2).
Continue reading “Residence Time: The Impact of Binding Kinetics on Compound-Target Interactions”
I’ve always believed that the best science stories don’t just inform — they move us. And in many cases, that’s quite literal.
Whether I’m designing a figure for a new assay or animating a step-by-step protocol, I see motion as a bridge that turns complexity into clarity. When used well, that bridge transforms scientific communication from dense and static into something dynamic, visual and memorable.
And it’s not just me — a graphic designer — saying this. Scholars like Daniel Liddle describe motion as a form of visual rhetoric: a way to persuade, clarify and build trust through movement. Motion isn’t just decoration — it’s meaning made visible.
In this post, I’ll explore why motion matters in scientific communication and how animation makes complex ideas easier to grasp. From turning a protocol into a story that sticks to making technical jargon something you can remember, motion design helps science feel more approachable and a lot more memorable.
Continue reading “From Content Creators to Communication Partners: The Role of Motion in Scientific Storytelling”When Dr. Rebecca Miles retired from her 25-year career in pharmaceutical research at Eli Lilly, she refocused her passion for science on a new challenge. Having worked her way from the bench to Senior Director, she knew first-hand the technical skills required to successfully advance genetic medicine programs. Now, she leverages her industry experience and the latest technologies at Taylor University, a liberal arts institution in Indiana known for its strong emphasis on education and practical training for students’ future careers. As a Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology, Dr. Miles trains her students to develop real-world skills and provides them exposure to technologies that impacted her own career. “I wanted to redesign the lab so that students could come out of the semester with some job skills if they wanted to be a technician in a lab,” she explains.
Dr. Miles structures her lab courses to incorporate techniques that scientists would routinely use in an industry setting. Students learn cell culture, plating, luminescent assays, and data analysis in ways that mirror the workflows used in biotech and pharmaceutical labs. She encourages her students to analyze their raw data to learn how the calculations work. “I want the students to calculate it in Excel and do it themselves and see the standard deviation,” she says.
Continue reading “Bringing Industry-Relevant Lab Experience to Undergraduate Life Sciences Majors with MyGlo®”In today’s biotech landscape, speed and precision are essential. For Tridek-One Therapeutics, a Paris-based spin-off from INSERM founded in 2018, these qualities drive their mission to develop first-in-class CD31 checkpoint agonist therapies for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. By leveraging CD31’s ITIM motifs to modulate ITAM signaling, their approach targets immune cells selectively, reducing the risk of broad immunosuppression.
Operating in a biotech incubator with limited space and shared equipment, the team—including Trang Tran, PhD, Preclinical Research Director, and Guillaume Even, Senior Laboratory Technician—depends on luminescent assays requiring both sensitivity and precise timing. Relying on a shared plate reader often delayed extracellular ATP assays that needed rapid measurement. Walking between lab spaces and potentially waiting for access to the plate reader was not feasible.
Tridek-One needed a dedicated, reliable luminometer that could support their time-sensitive workflow and fit into their small lab space. That’s when Tridek-One discovered the MyGlo® Reagent Reader, Promega’s compact, portable 96-well luminometer and transformed their workflow. Even noted that, when they first tried MyGlo®, they “directly saw the power of this small machine.” Tran and Even found that MyGlo®’s performance and sensitivity were comparable to more expensive multi-mode readers, which gave them confidence in choosing MyGlo® as a reliable and cost-effective solution. Because they prefer to use 96-well microplates, MyGlo® fit their experimental setup perfectly.
Continue reading “Compact Design, Big Impact: Tridek-One Therapeutics Leverages MyGlo® to Accelerate Discovery of Immunomodulating Treatments”
Ever spent your Friday night troubleshooting a cloning reaction that just won’t work?
We’ve been there. So have thousands of other scientists. That’s why Promega and Addgene teamed up to create something game-changing: a curated collection of 600+ luciferase reporter vectors, designed to help you skip the cloning and get straight to the data.
Addgene, the nonprofit plasmid-sharing platform trusted by researchers worldwide, and Promega, a global leader in luminescent assay technologies, have joined forces to make your gene expression, pathway analysis, and cell signaling experiments faster, easier, and reproducible.
In this post, we’re spotlighting 5 standout vectors from the new collection that are making life in the lab a whole lot better.
Continue reading “Top 5 Luciferase Reporter Vectors You Didn’t Know You Needed (But Now Can’t Live Without) “For research use only
When a veterinarian detects influenza A in pigs, they’re not just protecting a herd; they’re helping safeguard public health through broad ongoing surveillance.
To support rapid, biosafe detection of Influenza A viruses (H5N1, H3N2, H1N1) in animal populations, Promega and Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics have partnered to create a workflow that doesn’t require BSL-3 containment. It’s scalable, field-ready, and designed with One Health in mind.
This work is part of our broader commitment to enabling real-time disease surveillance—across species and borders. Together with Longhorn, we’re building molecular diagnostics that meet the moment, and the future.
Want the technical details? Read the press release.
Influenza A viruses—including highly pathogenic strains like H5N1—pose a dual threat to animal health and human safety. Yet despite the urgency, many surveillance and research efforts stall at the lab bench. Why? Because working with zoonotic pathogens often requires high-containment (BSL-3) facilities—especially when dealing with real-world samples like cow milk, poultry swabs, or pig oral fluids.
To help overcome this barrier, Promega and Longhorn set out to design a complete diagnostic workflow that does more than just detect. It needed to:
Continue reading “One Health in Action: Integrated Solutions for Animal Health Pathogens”Skeletal muscle is the body’s main consumer of glucose derived from food.
Muscle Fiber Types
Skeletal muscle is composed of two types of muscle fiber: Type I (slow-twitch) and Type II (fast-twitch).
Type I fibers contract slowly and can maintain contraction over long periods of time. They are rich in mitochondria and myoglobin and are well vascularized. These fibers rely mostly on aerobic metabolism to make the ATP that fuels cells. Type I muscle fibers are fatigue-resistant and efficient—great for supporting posture, distance running, cycling and any activity that needs steady output.
Type II fibers contract quickly, produce more force and power, but also fatigue more quickly. They have fewer mitochondria and less vasculature and rely more on anaerobic pathways like glycolysis (using glucose without oxygen).
Type I muscle fibers are smaller in diameter and generate less peak force but excel at endurance and heat management. Type II fibers are typically larger, produce more force and speed and handle explosive tasks like sprinting, jumping or heavy lifting.
Most muscles are a mix of fiber types, and genetics sets the starting ratio of Type l to Type ll, but fibers are adaptable. With aging and disuse, Type II fibers tend to atrophy more, which is one reason that power declines faster than endurance.
Another distinction important for this story: Type I fibers are more insulin-sensitive than Type II fibers. Additionally, these fiber types differ in different body types.
Continue reading “What Drives Muscle Fiber Shifts in Obesity and Type ll Diabetes?”This blog was written by guest contributor Tian Yang, Associate Product Manager, Promega, in collaboration with Kristin Huwiler, Manager, Small Molecule Drug Discovery, Promega.
For target-based drug discovery programs, biochemical assays using purified target proteins are often run for initial hit discovery, as these assays are target-specific, quantitative and amenable for high-throughput screens, allowing for precise characterization of target-compound interactions. However, proteins do not act in isolation inside the cells. Instead, proteins form complexes with other cellular components to drive cellular processes, signaling cascades, and metabolic pathways. Just as the interactions between a target protein and its binding partners can influence the target function, compound engagement with target proteins can vary depending on the protein complex formed.
Continue reading “Measure Engagement to Target Proteins within Complexes: Why Context Matters”