General

School Will Be Closed Today—Due to Spiders

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

student spiderAs the parent of school-age children, I have learned to dread that early morning call with the cheerful recorded voice that informs me that school has been canceled or delayed. Here in Wisconsin, these calls are almost always a result of inclement weather, and if we pay attention to the weather forecast, we typically know the night before that a delay or cancelation is a possibility.  Every once and awhile though, that call comes unexpectedly. On those mornings, while our kids dance around like deranged snow-bound monkeys, my husband and I drag out phones and calendars and begin the process of deciding who will be snow-bound with the monkeys, and who will escape go to work. However, even these unexpected snow days can’t really be called a great surprise. Snow days are a geographic risk of living in an area that has snow several months out of the year. I wonder, though, how my family would react if we got a call announcing school would be closed for the day due to a venomous spider infestation.

I know what you are thinking. This sounds like a bad horror movie; after all I am posting this on Halloween, a day associated (in the United States, at least) with all things creepy and crawly. Continue reading “School Will Be Closed Today—Due to Spiders”

Technology and Life in the Lab

Posted on by Michele Arduengo

It’s a brave new world in the laboratory, mobile devices, smart phones and tablet computers have transformed the way we do science. We’ve come a long way from “bubble getters” for acrylamide gels and foam bath floats. Today’s laboratory tools come with bells and whistles, touch screens and timers.
ehsept2013Need to design a double restriction enzyme digest? Just whip out your iOS or Android device and check the restriction enzyme tool on the Promega App–no more piles of biotech catalogs on the lab bench. Need to calculate the Tm of an oligo? Or find the recipe for a common buffer? Put away your scientific calculators and your big red protocol books; all you need is a smart phone. Need to count colonies? Forget the counting pen, use your camera phone instead. It’s amazing the tools that we have at our fingertips in the lab. Which ones are your favorites? What tool do you wish you had at your for your lab work? What do you still do with paper and pencil, because frankly nothing works better?

Celebrating Accomplishments

Posted on by Michele Arduengo

At Promega we like to celebrate the good things, little and big, from the publication of a peer-reviewed paper from a customer or one of our scientists, to the completion of a dissertation defense, to the launch of an exciting new technology. Today we celebrate, along with our local Madison and our global scientific communities, the public opening of our new cGMP manufacturing facility, dedicated to serving customers who need molecular biology reagents for IVD assays.

We could not have asked for a more beautiful fall day for the events. We’ll be live blogging from the opening to share a little bit of the celebration with our Promega Connections community as well.

Promega employees and Wisconsin community members gather for opening ceremonies
Promega employees and Wisconsin community members gather for opening ceremonies

Continue reading “Celebrating Accomplishments”

TB Vaccine News

Posted on by Isobel Maciver

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Ziehl Neelsen stain). Photo credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Ziehl Neelsen stain). Photo credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A paper published last week in Science Translational Medicine describes promising results from a phase 1 clinical trial of a new anti-tuberculosis vaccine. The vaccine, composed of a human Adenoviral vector expressing a Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigen, generated an immune response in people with and without previous exposure to the current anti-tuberculosis (BCG) vaccine.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, discovered by Robert Koch in 1882, is the organism that causes tuberculosis—commonly known as TB. After introduction of the BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin ) vaccine in 1919 and antibiotic treatment in the 1950s, the hope was that TB would be finally consigned to history—that Mycobacteruim tuberculosis would be a name only associated with the pre-antibiotic era and would not be a part of the 21st century world. However, over the last 30 years the emergence of multi-drug resistance and the worldwide HIV epidemic have led to the re-emergence of TB to the point where the following statements are true: Continue reading “TB Vaccine News”

Don’t Let Ribonucleases Ruin Your Week(end): Establish a Ribonuclease-free Environment

Posted on by Kelly Grooms
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My very first job in science was in a lab that worked exclusively with RNA, and it was only after I moved on to a different job that I learned just how much different the world of DNA research is from that of RNA. When working with DNA, for example, you rarely if ever have the sample you have labored over reduced to a fuzzy blur at the bottom of a gel because it has been degraded beyond rescue. With RNA, unfortunately, this happens all too frequently. In fact, a labmate of mine once put up a poll on the door to our lab asking if it was better to discover that your RNA sample was degraded on a Monday or a Friday.

The culprits in this scenario are Ribonucleases (RNases). They are everywhere. They are incredibly stable and difficult to inactivate. And, if you work with RNA, they are your enemy. Take heart though, they can be defeated if you follow some pretty simple steps.

Continue reading “Don’t Let Ribonucleases Ruin Your Week(end): Establish a Ribonuclease-free Environment”

Hepatitis C: A Promising Animal Model, and Reasons to Get Tested

Posted on by Kari Kenefick

Hepatitis C virus infection by source, in the U.S. From Wikipedia.
Hepatitis C virus infection by source, in the U.S. From Wikipedia.

During graduate studies in Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of WI-Madison, a favorite class was an infectious disease course that included an exercise in designing the perfect pathogen. This was a thought experiment, a writing exercise. No laboratory experimentation was involved.

You might initially think of a perfect pathogen as one that produces the most spores, allowing the pathogen to spread or seed itself in many locations. Copious slime and mucus production and projectile vomiting and diarrhea were frequently suggested during discussions of the perfect pathogen. And it’s true that these features really get the attention of the infected person and her/his caregiver. There are some pretty scary microbial buggers out there, for instance those that cause hemolytic anemia and/or raging fevers; these are the attention getters of the infectious disease world. Continue reading “Hepatitis C: A Promising Animal Model, and Reasons to Get Tested”

Healthy Lifestyles: Good for You and Your Telomeres Too

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

DNA in a test tubeWe all know that a healthy lifestyle (diet high in whole foods and low in fat, moderate exercise, managing stress and good social support) is good for us. In fact I will go so far as to say that it isn’t even news that these things help our health and well-being.  What is news, or at least newly published, is that these changes may also have a positive effect on telomerase activity and telomere length (1). Continue reading “Healthy Lifestyles: Good for You and Your Telomeres Too”

Is This What a Scientist Looks Like?

Posted on by Michele Arduengo

scientists-at-workI am the mother of a six-year-old girl who loves to get magazines in the mail. For several years my daughter has received an enjoyed popular kids’ science/international culture magazine. The stories are short and simple, and this magazine usually does a good job of presenting factual information in easy-to-digest forms. Each magazine comes with a set of animal cards, which we have diligently collected.

However, the latest issue that came to our mailbox really got me thinking. The final pages featured artwork by the young readers. I love the idea of featuring the work of the readers.  Usually, my daughter loves seeing what other children her age from around the world draw and take pictures of, and sometimes we have some pretty interesting discussions about the work.

This time though we didn’t spend much time talking about the art work. She wasn’t particularly interested, and I wasn’t sure I what I thought. But I may have missed a teachable moment. The theme for the pages was a Halloween-minded “spooky science”, and all of the pictures were of “mad scientists” alone at work doing presumably nefarious things in their laboratories. Of the eight drawings pictured, six of them pictured scientists that were human, and five of the humans were male. All of them were pale-skinned. The sole female scientist, whose lab featured a certificate with the words “monster maker”, was drawn by a girl. The ages of the children submitting the work ranged from 9 to 14. Continue reading “Is This What a Scientist Looks Like?”

Trypsin/Lys-C Mix: Alternative for standard trypsin protein digestions

Posted on by Gary Kobs

Trypsin/Lys-C Mix, Mass Spec Grade, is a mixture of Trypsin Gold, Mass Spectrometry Grade, and rLys-C, Mass Spec Grade. The Trypsin/Lys-C Mix is designed to improve digestion of proteins or protein mixtures in solution.It is a little known fact that trypsin cleaves at lysine residues with lesser efficiency than at arginine residues. Inefficient proteolysis at lysine residues is the major cause of missed (undigested) cleavages in trypsin digests.

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Supplementing trypsin with Lys-C enables cleavage at lysines with excepetional efficiency and specificity. Following the conventional trypsin digestion protocol (i.e., overnight incubation at nondenaturing conditions, reduction,alkylation, 25:1 protein:protease ratio [w/w], mix and incubate overnight at 37°C.) Replacing trypsin with Trypsin/Lys-C Mix in this conventional protocol leads to multiple benefits for protein analysis including more accurate mass spectrometry-based protein quantitation and improved protein mass spectrometry analytical reproducibility.

Are you looking for proteases to use in your research?
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What Came First: LP or the Cow? Genetic and Cultural Co-evolution of Lactase Persistence and Dairying

Posted on by Kelly Grooms

Cow with milk.The ability for adults to digest the milk sugar, lactose, is often referred to as lactase persistence (LP), describing the continued (persistent) production of lactase into adulthood. LP is an autosomal dominant trait that is most often associated with a T allele situated 13,910 base pairs (–13,910*T allele) upstream of the lactase gene, LCT. Archaeogenetic data indicates that pre- and early Neolithic populations were largely LP-negative, and that the frequency of the LP phenotype rose dramatically in Europe around 8,000 years ago, coinciding with the Neolithic transition from a hunter-gather to an agricultural-based lifestyle (1) and the appearance of domesticated dairying animals. Today roughly 35% of adults are lactose persistent. The frequency varies dramatically by geographic region, from a high prevalence in Europe (89–90%) and to a relatively low prevalence in the eastern Mediterranean (15%)(1). The spread of lactase persistence is an often cited example of gene-culture co-evolution. You can’t separate the history of domestic dairying and the evolution of lactase persistence, but scientists are still trying to understand how these two worked together. Continue reading “What Came First: LP or the Cow? Genetic and Cultural Co-evolution of Lactase Persistence and Dairying”