School Will Be Closed Today—Due to Spiders

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

student spiderAs the parent of school-age children, I have learned to dread that early morning call with the cheerful recorded voice that informs me that school has been canceled or delayed. Here in Wisconsin, these calls are almost always a result of inclement weather, and if we pay attention to the weather forecast, we typically know the night before that a delay or cancelation is a possibility.  Every once and awhile though, that call comes unexpectedly. On those mornings, while our kids dance around like deranged snow-bound monkeys, my husband and I drag out phones and calendars and begin the process of deciding who will be snow-bound with the monkeys, and who will escape go to work. However, even these unexpected snow days can’t really be called a great surprise. Snow days are a geographic risk of living in an area that has snow several months out of the year. I wonder, though, how my family would react if we got a call announcing school would be closed for the day due to a venomous spider infestation.

I know what you are thinking. This sounds like a bad horror movie; after all I am posting this on Halloween, a day associated (in the United States, at least) with all things creepy and crawly. Continue reading “School Will Be Closed Today—Due to Spiders”

Technology and Life in the Lab

Posted on by Michele Arduengo, PhD

It’s a brave new world in the laboratory, mobile devices, smart phones and tablet computers have transformed the way we do science. We’ve come a long way from “bubble getters” for acrylamide gels and foam bath floats. Today’s laboratory tools come with bells and whistles, touch screens and timers.
ehsept2013Need to design a double restriction enzyme digest? Just whip out your iOS or Android device and check the restriction enzyme tool on the Promega App–no more piles of biotech catalogs on the lab bench. Need to calculate the Tm of an oligo? Or find the recipe for a common buffer? Put away your scientific calculators and your big red protocol books; all you need is a smart phone. Need to count colonies? Forget the counting pen, use your camera phone instead. It’s amazing the tools that we have at our fingertips in the lab. Which ones are your favorites? What tool do you wish you had at your for your lab work? What do you still do with paper and pencil, because frankly nothing works better?

A Clean Brain Is a Healthy Brain

Posted on by Anupama Gopalakrishnan

College student sleeping instead of studying
Can you sleep your way to a “cleaner” brain?
It is hard to undermine the role of cleanliness in disease prevention, both internally and externally. Within our body, the lymphatic system plays an important role in clearing the intercellular passages of large and potentially harmful toxic molecules and recirculate back into the blood stream. This enables the transport of these molecules to liver for inactivation and subsequent removal from the body. Therefore, lymphatic system prevents build-up of soluble proteins in the interstitial space. Typically, more metabolically active a cell is, more intricate is the lymphatic vasculature around it. This observation was in contrast to our scientific knowledge a few years ago, when we believed that due to the presence of the blood-brain barrier, there was no lymphatic system active in the brain. The brain, as we know, is highly active metabolically and the removal of harmful solutes and proteins from the neuronal vicinity is of utmost urgency. For a long time it was believed that cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), while coursing through the brain also removed cellular metabolite by products, apart from carrying nutrients to brain tissue, through a process known as diffusion. This is a rather slow process and it did not very well explain how large molecules such as proteins were removed from the interstitial place.

Recently, using two-photon imaging technique in live mice, scientists at Rochester discovered (1) that there is another vasculature functioning in the brain which circulates CSF to every corner of the brain much more efficiently, through bulk flow or convection. Continue reading “A Clean Brain Is a Healthy Brain”

Successful Ligation and Cloning of Your Insert

Posted on by Sara Klink
Ligation and cloning
Cloning PCR product.

You have PCR amplified your insert of interest, made sure the PCR product is A tailed and are ready to clone into a T vector (e.g., pGEM®-T Easy Vector). The next step is as simple as mixing a few microliters of your purified product with the cloning vector in the presence of DNA ligase, buffer and ATP, right? In fact, you may need to consider the molar ratio of T vector to insert.

Continue reading “Successful Ligation and Cloning of Your Insert”

Testing for Neonatal Sepsis: The Next Generation of Biomarkers

Posted on by Radhika Ganeshan

newbornNeonatal sepsis is a systemic infection prevalent in preterm and very low birth weight infants and causes high morbidity. Most cases of neonatal sepsis are caused by pathogenic bacteria that invade the bloodstream, triggering an abrupt and overwhelming infection in the target organs accompanied by a systemic inflammatory response. Testing for neonatal sepsis is challenging because it does not affect a specific organ and presents multiple symptoms that are often confused with other related conditions (1). Current diagnostic tests for sepsis include those that identify markers of the host response to infection (e.g., procalcitonin, C reactive protein, cytokines, etc.) and those that detect bacterial infection in blood (bacteremia) (2). The lack of specific diagnostic biomarkers for early and accurate detection of neonatal sepsis has spurred the quest for next-generation biomarkers using powerful mass screening technologies such as proteomics. Continue reading “Testing for Neonatal Sepsis: The Next Generation of Biomarkers”

Celebrating Accomplishments

Posted on by Michele Arduengo, PhD

At Promega we like to celebrate the good things, little and big, from the publication of a peer-reviewed paper from a customer or one of our scientists, to the completion of a dissertation defense, to the launch of an exciting new technology. Today we celebrate, along with our local Madison and our global scientific communities, the public opening of our new cGMP manufacturing facility, dedicated to serving customers who need molecular biology reagents for IVD assays.

We could not have asked for a more beautiful fall day for the events. We’ll be live blogging from the opening to share a little bit of the celebration with our Promega Connections community as well.

Promega employees and Wisconsin community members gather for opening ceremonies
Promega employees and Wisconsin community members gather for opening ceremonies

Continue reading “Celebrating Accomplishments”

Detecting Apoptosis

Posted on by Michele Arduengo, PhD

The concept of cell death as a normal cell fate was articulated only three years after Schleiden and Schwann introduced the Cell Theory when, in 1874, Vogt described natural cell death as an integral part of toad development (as cited in Cotter and Curtin, 2003). Since these early observations, natural cell death has been described “anew” several times. In 1885 Flemming provided the first morphological description of a natural cell death process, which we now label “apoptosis”, a term coined by Kerr and colleagues to describe the unique morphology associated with a cell death that differs from necrosis (as cited in Kerr et al. 1972).

Apoptosis morphology
Progression of morphology changes during apoptosis.

In the 1970s and 1980s, studies revealed that apoptosis not only had specific morphological characteristics but that it was also a tightly regulated process with specific biochemical characteristics. Studies of cell lineage in the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, showed that apoptosis was a normal feature of the nematode’s invariant developmental program (Hengartner, 1997). At the biochemical level, Wyllie showed that DNA degradation by a specific endonuclease during apoptosis resulted in a DNA ladder composed of mono- and oligonucleosomal-sized fragments (Wyllie, 1980).

These and many other studies have proven that apoptosis is a critical component of development, and when it doesn’t happen appropriately, it can be pathological, leading to cancers or other diseases. Therefore, understanding how and when apoptosis occurs and the many signals that can trigger this process is a focus of many laboratory experiments.

There are many ways to detect apoptosis in cells or tissues. This blog describes some of the most common ones.

Continue reading “Detecting Apoptosis”

TB Vaccine News

Posted on by Isobel Maciver

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Ziehl Neelsen stain). Photo credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Ziehl Neelsen stain). Photo credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A paper published last week in Science Translational Medicine describes promising results from a phase 1 clinical trial of a new anti-tuberculosis vaccine. The vaccine, composed of a human Adenoviral vector expressing a Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigen, generated an immune response in people with and without previous exposure to the current anti-tuberculosis (BCG) vaccine.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, is the organism that causes tuberculosis—commonly known as TB. After introduction of the BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin ) vaccine in 1919 and antibiotic treatment in the 1950s, the hope was that TB would be finally consigned to history—that Mycobacteruim tuberculosis would be a name only associated with the pre-antibiotic era and would not be a part of the 21st century world. However, over the last 30 years the emergence of multi-drug resistance and the worldwide HIV epidemic have led to the re-emergence of TB to the point where the following statements are true: Continue reading “TB Vaccine News”

Cholesterol Management and the Importance of Diversity in Clinical Trials

Posted on by Karen Reece
Source: National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute
Source: National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute

According to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (1), 50% of women in the US have high or border line cholesterol levels and cholesterol level tends to increase as we age. Most of you are probably aware that cholesterol levels are important for health. Cholesterol is a waxy, sticky molecule that is a very important part of your cellular make up, so cholesterol is essential for life. However, if we have too much cholesterol circulating in our blood, it can build up along artery walls and create blockages (plaques) leading to heart attacks or strokes.

Continue reading “Cholesterol Management and the Importance of Diversity in Clinical Trials”

Don’t Let Ribonucleases Ruin Your Week(end): Establish a Ribonuclease-free Environment

Posted on by Kelly Grooms
buffers_image1_274x218

My very first job in science was in a lab that worked exclusively with RNA, and it was only after I moved on to a different job that I learned just how much different the world of DNA research is from that of RNA. When working with DNA, for example, you rarely if ever have the sample you have labored over reduced to a fuzzy blur at the bottom of a gel because it has been degraded beyond rescue. With RNA, unfortunately, this happens all too frequently. In fact, a labmate of mine once put up a poll on the door to our lab asking if it was better to discover that your RNA sample was degraded on a Monday or a Friday.

The culprits in this scenario are Ribonucleases (RNases). They are everywhere. They are incredibly stable and difficult to inactivate. And, if you work with RNA, they are your enemy. Take heart though, they can be defeated if you follow some pretty simple steps.

Continue reading “Don’t Let Ribonucleases Ruin Your Week(end): Establish a Ribonuclease-free Environment”