luminescent assay

Bringing Industry-Relevant Lab Experience to Undergraduate Life Sciences Majors with MyGlo®

Posted on by Promega

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. Rebecca Miles undergraduate class with their MyGlo®

Teaching Students Modern Technologies

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.

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How to Get Real-Time Kinetic Data With GloMax® Microplate Readers

Posted on by Johanna Lee

Understanding how a compound or drug affects cellular pathways often requires measuring kinetic changes over an extended period of time—from several hours to days. Live-cell kinetic cell-based assays that measure cell viability, cytotoxicity, apoptosis and other cellular pathways are great for collecting real-time data. You don’t necessarily need expensive equipment to run these types of assays. In the videos below, Dr. Sarah Mahan, a research scientist at Promega, demonstrates how you can easily get great 24-hour or multi-day kinetic data using a GloMax® Microplate Reader.

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Why You Don’t Need to Select a Wavelength for a Luciferase Assay

Posted on by Ben Schmidt
Promega kit depicted; test involves wavelength for a luciferase assay.

It’s a question I’m asked probably once a week. “What wavelength do I select on my luminometer when performing a luciferase assay?” The question is a good and not altogether unexpected one, especially for those new to bioluminescent assays. The answer is that in most cases, you don’t and in fact shouldn’t select a wavelength (the exception to this rule is if you’re measuring light emitted in two simultaneous luciferase reactions). To understand why requires a bit of an explanation of absorbance, fluorescence, and luminescence assays, and the differences among them.

Absorbance, fluorescence, and luminescence assays are all means to quantify something of interest, be that a genetic reporter, cell viability, cytotoxicity, apoptosis, or other markers. In principle, they are all similar. For example, a genetic reporter assay is an indicator of gene expression. The promoter of a gene of interest can be cloned upstream of a reporter such as β-galactosidase, GFP, or firefly luciferase. The amount of each of these reporters that is transcribed into mRNA and translated into protein by the cell is indicative of the endogenous expression of the gene of interest.

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