Ah, the wonders and frustrations of cloning. We’ve all been there. After careful planning, you have created the cloned plasmid containing your DNA sequence of interest, transformed it into bacterial cells and carefully spread those cells on a plate to grow. Now you stand at your bench gazing down at your master piece: a plate full of tiny bacterial colonies. Somewhere inside those cells is your DNA sequence, happily replicating with its plasmid host. But wait – logic tells you that not ALL of those colonies can contain your plasmid. There must be hundreds of colonies. Which ones have your plasmid? You begin to panic. Visions of yourself old and grey and still screening colonies flash through your mind. At the next bench, your lab-mate is cheerfully selecting colonies to screen. Although there are hundreds of colonies on her plate as well, some are white and some are blue. She is only picking the white colonies. What does she know that you don’t?
Continue reading “Selecting the Right Colony: The Answer is There in Blue and White”
Let’s face it, most lab techs and purchasing agents aren’t all that happy when you send them an Instagram picture of your latest lunchroom-napkin cloning strategy as your order form for your next big cloning experiment. So we have created the 
Already have a favorite vector and a freezer full of restriction enzymes? No problem, skip those steps and move on to getting the perfectly sized nucleic acid markers or the particular polymerase your experiment requires.