In April 2018, law enforcement officials announced the arrest of a suspect in the Golden State Killer case (New York Times 4/27/2018 ). Shortly after the announcement, those same law enforcement officers explained that detectives had used a public forensic genealogy web site to help identify the killer.
What does it mean when a law enforcement agency accesses a public genetic genealogy database to search for a suspect in a crime?
Continue reading “Questions of Genome Privacy and Protection”
Asp-N is a endoproteinase hydrolyzes peptide bonds on the N-terminal side of aspartic residues. The native form is isolated from Pseudomonas fragi. The majority of vendors currently provide a commercial product that consists of 2µg of lyophilized material in a flat bottom vial, and sold for $175–200 US. Formatting such a small amount of material in flat bottom vial can lead to inconsistent resuspension of the protease. Inconsistent working concentrations will lead to non-reproducible data. The current high price also prohibits large-scale use.
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The new recombinant Asp-N protease is cloned from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia and expressed in E. coli. Recombinant Asp-N has similar amino acid cleavage specificity as compared to native Asp-N. Digestion of a yeast extract with native and recombinant Asp-N produces very similar results. Providing 10µg lyophilized material in V-shaped vial with a visible cake enables more consistent re-suspension resulting in reproducible data. Due to improved yields the list price is now approximately 40% less when compared to native enzyme.
Learn more about this new recombinant Asp-N protease.
Last updated: 1/22/21
Pipettes are such a routine part of everyday life in the lab that it can be easy to take them for granted. Their accuracy is vital, and there are many things we can adopt as best practices for success. Here are a few tips (no pun intended) gathered from around the Web by Kim Steinhauser of the Promega Metrology Department–the group charged with keeping our pipettes and other lab equipment functional and accurate.
Continue reading “How to Take Care of Your Pipettes”
Implementing automated nucleic acid purification or making changes to your high-throughput (HT) workflow can be complicated and time-consuming. There are also many barriers to success such as challenging samples types and maintaining desirable downstream results that can add to the stress, not to mention actually getting the robotic instrumentation to do what you want it to. All of this makes it easy to understand why many labs avoid automating or own expensive instrumentation that goes unused.
Continue reading “High-Throughput Purification with Experts Included”
In Technical Services, we frequently answer questions about whether a kit will work with a particular type of sample. An easy way to find out if other researchers have already tested your sample type of interest is to search a citation database such as Pub Med for the name of the kit and your specific sample type. We also have a searchable peer-reviewed citations database on our web site for papers that specifically cite use of our products. And on many of our product pages, you can find a list of papers that cite use of those products. In Technical Services, we are happy to help you in this search and let you know if scientists here at Promega have tested a particular application or sample type. This information provides a good starting point to optimize your own experiments.
One common question is “can the Caspase-Glo® Assays be used with tissue homogenates?” While Promega has not tested the Caspase-Glo® Assays with tissue homogenates, scientists outside of Promega have used the assays with tissue homogenates with success. As with almost all of our kits, Resources are provided on the catalog page including a list of Citations. As an example, here is a link to the Citations for the Caspase-Glo® 3/7 Assay Systems. We also have an article highlighting a citation on detecting caspase activities in mouse liver. A variety of lysis buffers have been used to make tissue homogenates for this application. To avoid nonspecific protein degradation, it is useful to include a protease inhibitor cocktail in the lysis buffer. The use of protease inhibitors doesn’t usually affect our assay chemistries. Additionally, many commercially available protease inhibitor sets can be used that do not contain caspase inhibitors. It is important to consider the specificity of the kit being used and include proper controls to ensure that the luciferase reaction is performing as expected. For more information on citations and example protocols, feel free to contact us here at Technical Services and we can help get you started with your sample type.
In the United States, the last Monday of May is Memorial Day, a national holiday in which we honor those who have given their lives in service to the country. For those of us living in Wisconsin, Memorial Day is also usually preceded by the first truly warm weekend of summer. So as families remember their loved ones, they gather together to create new memories in parks and backyards, around picnic tables or on grassy lawns–beginning the summer season with a cookout, picnics and bar-b-ques.
Here at Promega we love a good cookout too. So a few of us have cobbled together some of our favorite summer recipes to share with you. Do you have a favorite summer recipe? Share it in the comments below. (Please note metric conversions are approximate and have not been tested.) Continue reading “Kicking Off Summer with Some Cookout Favorites”
Happy graduation! Whether you graduated last week or twenty years ago, the experience is roughly the same. As soon as you arrive on the far side of the stage, empty diploma folder under your arm, hand still sticky from the Dean’s sweaty handshake, the reality of post-academic life sets in. Perhaps grad school is on the horizon for some and others might be busy prepping for med school. For some of us, though, our years of formal education end after four and we run off to rejoice in our newfound freedom. No more exams, group projects, late nights writing papers, disapproving professors, supervisors and mentors – done with that life forever! We didn’t even bother with the GRE, MCAT, LSAT or a single “Why [insert school]” essay. Now it’s off to enjoy the Real World, which will definitely be better than college.
I’ve found, in my one year of post-college life, that sometimes you can miss academic life. You’ll occasionally look back and think, “I didn’t know how good I had it.” In particular, those of us with a pure love of learning can find ourselves unsatisfied with our prospective learning opportunities or lack thereof. We spent college soaking up mountains of knowledge–and not just from textbooks. University life gives you access to free talks from eminent thought leaders, unrestricted access to myriad scientific journals, and plenty of people around who are eager to argue about that day’s lecture in Cell Biology or Neuroscience. After college, it’s tough to fill that void.
I work at Promega (obviously), a biotech company, so I still have access to journals and there are plenty of brilliant scientists around me. However, I’m still looking for more opportunities to learn and grow. I may be out of school, but the love of science never goes away. Here are a few of my tips for everyone receiving their hard-earned science degree this spring.
Continue reading “When School is just a Memory: Science after College Graduation”
When Heather Berlin was 5 years old, she realized that, at some point in the future, she was going to die. This disturbed her so much that she couldn’t sleep all night. The next morning, she asked her father where she could store all her thoughts so they could live on after she died. There’s no way to do that, said her physician father. “What can I do to make this happen?” she asked. “Maybe become a psychiatrist?” said her dad. Decades later, she became an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research focuses on interactions of the brain and mind, with the goal of treating and preventing psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Dr. Heather Berlin told this story at the International Forum on Consciousness held at the BioPharmaceutical Technology Center Institute in Madison, Wisconsin last week. This annual forum gathers scientists from around the world, all interested in understanding how our conscious and unconscious minds work. This year, the forum focused on the newest research and technology for detecting and measuring consciousness. As someone with limited knowledge in this field, my mind was blown by how much researchers have learned so far about consciousness. (No, we can’t store our thoughts in a box…yet.) Here are a few takeaways:
Continue reading “Wonders of the Conscious and Unconscious Mind—What I Learned from the International Forum on Consciousness”In April of 2017 a profile appeared on the dating app Tinder. Describing himself as “One of a kind”, the poster was 43 years old, not in great physical shape, and yet so sought after he required around the clock body guards. His name was Sudan, and he was the last living male northern white rhino. His keepers at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya weren’t expecting Sudan to find love. They were hoping to raise awareness of the species’ dire situation and money for the research and development of an in vitro fertilization (IVF) method for rhinos.
Northern white rhinos used to range over all or parts of Uganda, Sudan, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. In the 1960s there were an estimated 2,360 northern white rhinos left in the wild (1). Civil unrest in the region made conservation difficult, and by 2003 poaching and other pressures had reduced the number of northern white rhinos living in the wild to four individuals living in the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There has been no sign of that wild population since 2007 (2), and they are considered extinct in the wild as of 2008. Continue reading “From Dating Apps to In Vitro Fertilization, the Challenges to Saving the Endangered Northern White Rhino”
The keynote speaker for this year’s International Symposium on Human Identification (ISHI), Andrew Hessle, describes himself as a catalyst for big projects and ideas (1). In biology, catalysts are enzymes that alter the microenvironment and lower the energy of activation so that a chemical reaction that would proceed anyway happens at a much faster rate—making a reaction actually useful to the biological system in which it occurs.
In practical terms, Andrew Hessel is the person who helps us over our inertia. Instead of waiting for someone else, he sees a problem, gathers an interested group of people with diverse skills and perspectives, creates a microenvironment for these people to interact, and runs with them straight toward the problem. Boom. Reaction started.
One of the problems he has set his mind toward is that of cancer drug development. Continue reading “Catalyzing Solutions with Synthetic Biology”
