Reportergene

The NanoLuc luciferase reporter dossier

2013-01-22T22:42:00.001+01:00

One of the 2012 top innovations, says The Scientist, is the new NanoLuc luciferase reporter. But what is NanoLuc exactly and what's really innovative? When I read Vicky Chandler on my free copy of The Scientist that NanoLuc was a 2012 innovation, I didn't know what she was talking about. I knew that firefly luciferase has some limitations, so I started collecting information to evaluate if I

Tool of the year 2012: Tissue Lyser

2013-01-08T13:00:00.000+01:00

This is Qiagen's Tissue Lyser, the best tool to homogenize 24 or more tissue samples in Trizol in one single shot. Without cross-contamination. It has been three years that I don't touch a Polytron, and my life it's much easier. Basically, at the time of tissue dissection, I'm taking a piece of tissue, putting it into a 2 mL eppendorf tube, adding a 5 mm inox bead and flash freezing in

Goodbye Rita

2012-12-30T16:46:00.004+01:00

Italian scientist and Nobel prizewinner Rita Levi-Montalcini passed away today at the age of 103. Rita was of Jewish origin and I remember reading in her biography how, during World War II, she was concealing in the Alps with her brother. Far from the city (and from the university) they had only self-roared chickens as food, but Rita continued her researches on chicken embryos that were then

A genetically encoded probe for EM

2012-12-15T13:39:00.000+01:00

Fluorescence microscopy experienced a 'green' revolution when GFP sent a surge of excitement for live imaging through the life sciences. Meanwhile, electron microscopy (EM) has been waiting patiently for the right probe to come along. EM offers brilliant high-resolution images of ultrastructure, but labeling molecules with specific antibodies is finicky business: the same permeabilization that

Coincidence reporter biocircuit

2012-10-04T18:18:00.002+02:00

Or when luciferase is positive because of a coincidence Sometimes an experiment is working but our interpretation of results is not. The underlying assumption of any reporter gene system is the relationship between the assay readout and the molecular/cellular mechanism for which the assay has been engineered to report. For instance, from a PPAR-responsive promoter placed upstream the

Nature subscription at impact factor cost

2012-09-25T13:27:00.001+02:00

Nature magazine is celebrating his highest impact factor by offering a print and online subscription at 36$ instead of 209$. Here. It's around 0.70$ per issue, or 1.2$ per Pound. Already tried last year and fully satisfied. You may also qualify for Nature Methods given for free. Here.

Mouse dissection with reporter genes

2012-05-25T16:11:00.000+02:00

Forget the scalpel, use Fluorescent Proteins and FluoRender FluoRender is a publicly available interactive rendering tool for confocal microscopy data visualization developed by the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute of the University of Utah. FluoRender combines the renderings of multi-channel volume data and polygon mesh data, where the properties of each dataset can be adjusted

WTF is in a kit? [ipse dixit #3]

2012-05-10T18:35:00.000+02:00

or: Why I'm dismissing molecular biology kits Qiagen workers making the secret recipe - Jeffrey/MacMillan for: Capital Business I love kits as a concept. They are practical and save time. Making and storing buffers takes time (and space), I prefer having more time to read and think. Because I prefer making better science than spending my day around a plasmid miniprep, or maybe because I'm

New Brainbow Hearth: lineage analysis

2012-05-07T13:43:00.000+02:00

The creative use of reporter genes uncover a new mechanism shaping vertebrate organ development During development, the heart must accomodate to pump all the blood required by the incresing size of the organism. In fact, the heart can enhance its functional capacity by expanding its volume and increasing its muscle mass. How does this translate at cellular levels? Is that each heart cell

Cover - new paper about a mitosis-reporter mouse model

2012-04-13T15:13:00.001+02:00

Molecular imaging of NF-Y transcriptional activity maps proliferation sites in live animals. Mol Biol Cell., 2012 23(8); 1467-74 doi:10.1091/mbc.E12-01-0039 Goeman F, Manni I, Artuso S, Ramachandran B, Toietta G, Bossi G, Rando G, Cencioni C, Germoni S, Straino S, Capogrossi MC, Bacchetti S, Maggi A, Sacchi A, Ciana P, Piaggio G. Abstract In vivo imaging involving the use of genetically

[Cool site] Biology.SE - the first 100 days

2012-03-22T14:40:00.000+01:00

My preferred online place to exchange biology knowledge. This is the most interesting Q&A site for biology researchers, academics, and students I stumbled upon so far. I'm really excited about it and since some increased participation is required to exit the beta stage, I'm inviting you to have a visit and consider joining. Forget noncurated forums plenty of 'why my beta galactosidase

Selling your ideas like Gyro Gearloose

2012-03-06T20:30:00.000+01:00

We saw that crowdsourcing pays some cheques to the scientist making his own research lab in the garage. But how to find a relevant research demand? You have already read about Fold.it, the site where people play online to solve protein structure for free. Imagine now an online pavillion who is actually paying the intellectual work of scientists working at home through different calls - named

[Interview] Sentinels for detection of estrogenic compounds

2012-03-05T21:30:00.000+01:00

After a PhD in cellular and molecular medicine, Daniel Gorelick continued to study how steroid hormones affect development and behavior. He already wrote a guest post about enhancer discovery few years ago, and some days ago I had occasion to speak with him about his last paper. In a recent Endocrinology issue, Daniel describes a transgenic ERE-Luc zebrafish developed to visualize estrogen

metabolic pathways: microarray analysis tools

2012-02-29T21:12:00.000+01:00

Three generation approaches are today available for functional pathway analysis. Just brief notes and many links for my (and perhaps your) memory and benefit. Based largely on this Plos Computational Biology review by Khatri et al., 2012. Pathway-centric approaches are intended to reduce the complexity of the transcriptome profiling data and are well accepted because a significant modulation

Solve puzzles for science

2012-02-17T16:55:00.001+01:00

In science, game-driven crowdsourcing makes 18 fold better Because of sequential nature of mRNA translation, proteins begin as strings of 50-1000 amino acids that immediately fold into specific 3D-coiled structures. Understanding how proteins fold into unique three-dimensional shapes is a big quest. Just a small protein can fold in astronomical number of ways, so one of the hardest problems

DIY Research: how to start their own

2012-02-15T10:12:00.000+01:00

It is possible for researchers to start their own private lab? Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); If in your life you want to sell pizza, it is easy to find a business plan: just open a pizza

Image manipulations: so useless and miserable

2012-01-31T15:18:00.000+01:00

I did not check on the real original publications if the alleged image manipulations spotlighted in this video are really present, or were just fabricated for the video. And I will not do it. However, if the video is really reporting actual manipulations, my main conclusion will be that the peer-review system is going to fail. For my academic CV, publications in peer-reviewed journals are a

Where are your cells from?

2012-01-23T17:38:00.000+01:00

Are your human cells coming from executed prisoners? During the Christmas pause, I had occasion to spoke with one of my elderly aunts that I probably see once or twice a year. She had always admired my path to pursue biomedical research, but often she had shown to be uncomfortable with the notion that biomedical research is also done by killing mice. So, while eating some killed turkey -

Organic iPad made with bugs, my Xmas gift

2011-12-20T18:04:00.000+01:00

After the December 2009 'Bacteria towing Santa's wagon', this is the ultimate example of life-imitating art. Millions of E. coli bacteria glowing together. Biologists and bioengineers at UC San Diego constructed this remarkable living display by engineering the biological clocks of bacterial cells to fluoresce together like blinking light bulbs. And they synchronized thousands of these blinking

trends in synthetic biology 2011

2011-11-15T12:59:00.002+01:00

The 2010 has been the year of Venter's synthetic genome. What about 2011, new developments at the horizon? Synthetic physiology. One goal of synthetic physiology would be to integrate a new genetic function into mammalian cells, i.e., a circuit that can detect a diseased state and then trigger a therapeutic appropriate response. Two studies are pursuing this goal. The group of Martin Fussenegger

packaging madness

2011-10-27T20:54:00.001+02:00

I should say thanks to Nick for having posted yesterday some pictures of Sigma-Aldrich packaging madness. Packaging has a cost and an effect on environment, however, as Nick correctly points, some chemicals shipped by Sigma are dangerous and this might justify some excessive packaging. This morning I received some chemically-inert stainless steel beads that I'm using to extract RNA with the

ELN - Electronic Lab Notebooks

2011-10-11T20:49:00.001+02:00

The opportunity to switch to electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) had been discussed for 2 or perhaps 3 decades without any concrete change. However, the recent boom for tablets, ipads and the new amazon fire costing less than one pipette, is pushing toward a ELN resurrence. We will have ELNs in the lab soon? In the last months, I gave my advisory counseling to some companies considering to enter this

life correlations

2011-09-16T00:32:00.000+02:00

I'm going to the EMBO conference on Nuclear Receptors. Last time I went - four years ago - my wife was pregnant and in the middle of the last talk phoned me because of the labor contractions. My house was 100 km long away, and I come back in time. Now, my wife is once again pregnant and tomorrow I'm taking the flight. Delivery is expected on February. Hopefully, it should be easier this time.

Why scientists are doing fluorescent pets?

2011-09-12T20:49:00.004+02:00

Dear Dr. ReporterGene, what is going on? Why scientists are taking our dogs, rabbits, pigs, fishes and now even cats and after some buzz manipulations, they transform a cute pet into scary fluorescent beast? What is the point in making the cat to glow? A: If a laboratory animal glows, it is proof that a genetic manipulation has been done. Our genome (our DNA) is too small to hold it down with

This is important, go and read

2011-09-06T21:52:00.000+02:00

Jonathan has just made a call to bloggers and authors of peer-reviewed research manuscripts to get used in aggregating publications with online comments. I find this important because we can achieve a second-layer that better connects scientific community and, as a consequence, facilitates meritocracy. Two years ago I wrote something about it in: does a blogger influence IF. So, go to read