General Interest

In 2015, we published an extensive array of tips, protocols, videos, articles of general interest, customer testimonials, and technical and application notes on bioradiations.com. Here is a list of the most popular 2015 stories.

What is so noble about receiving an award? What if it is an Ig Nobel award? This article reviews what Ig Nobel awards are, how they are determined, and discusses some research topics that were awarded the Ig Nobel awards this year.

Academic labs don’t have the money to do full-scale validations of antibodies. What tricks can small biotechs teach them about validation? Find out.

From using nonspecific polyclonal antibodies to developing monoclonal antibodies from immortalized antibody-producing cells to antibody engineering and generation of antibodies using an animal-free library with billions of antibody fragments to choose from, the antibody technology has seen tremendous advances. Explore where this journey started and what the current trends are and what the human combinatorial antibody library (HuCAL) technology destination has to offer!

Few discoveries have changed the pace of discovery and the types of questions we can ask as drastically and quickly as CRISPR-based genome editing. But where did CRISPR come from? How was it adapted to become such a game-changing genome editing tool? And why are some of its greatest proponents alarmed?

Finding ways to slow or reverse aging intrigues scientists and non-scientists alike. In recent studies, merging the circulatory systems of young and old mice rejuvenated skeletal muscle, brain, and cardiac cells, indicating the presence of a systemic “anti-aging factor” initially thought to be growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF11). However, a recent publication showed that GDF11 actually promotes aging, emphasizing the need for further integrative analysis of the aging process.

When you have finished all your experiments and have the paper ready in your head, you need to consider several factors before sending it for publication. Here are some tips that Bio-Rad’s PrimePCR™ PCR Primers and Assays group put together for getting the paper published successfully.

What do computers and cells have in common? Can cells function as computers or recording devices? Can a bacterial computer be built? Synthetic biologists have recently developed a platform called SCRIBE (Synthetic Cellular Recorders Integrating Biological Events) to convert genomic DNA into a “tape” for recording and memorizing information. This article explores many interesting aspects of autonomous cellular memory and the potential applications of such living computational systems.

Researchers love their lab instruments…and sometimes hate them too. Out of such complex human-machine relationships come nicknames, many many nicknames. Read on to explore the ways scientists name their instruments, the names they choose, and contribute your favorite instrument nickname!

What’s the science that keeps your food safe? Find out with an inside look at Bio-Rad’s Food Science Division, and discover how techniques from the research lab are applied every day to guard what you eat.