“It was just a sea of Promega everywhere,” says Rebecca Roberts, a Promega Field Applications Scientist. “Floor to ceiling, piled up with Maxwell instruments, Maxprep Liquid Handlers, all the accessories and consumables…” In her role on the Field Application Scientists team, Rebecca travels the United States installing the Maxprep Liquid Handler in customer labs and […]
The thought of an expensive instrument falling out of use and gathering dust on the shelf is enough to bring a tear to any lab manager’s eye. An instrument that once served a key purpose and now functions only as a “paperweight” is a tragic waste of valuable resources. Fortunately, it is sometimes possible to […]
In the fifty years since the first reported transformation of recombinant plasmids into bacteria (1), plasmid cloning has become one of the pillars of synthetic biology research and manufacturing biopharmaceuticals. But purifying plasmids is no small feat. It can often take hours of hands-on time to go from culture to eluate with low-throughput and time-sensitive […]
I was blasting a holiday music playlist while driving recently, and Presley’s Blue Christmas played. I couldn’t get the phrase “Christmas Cloning Blues” out of my mind, and by the time I arrived at my destination, this happened: Cloning Blues Christmas (to the tune of Blue Christmas by Elvis Presley) I’ll have a blue Christmas […]
In 2022, our bloggers wrote on topics ranging from monkeypox outbreaks to cultured meat in biotech labs to preventing the next pandemic. Our top three most-viewed blog posts this year have the commonality of Promega products helping to advance important research in different fields and push science a step forward in the world. Take a […]
Researchers at Texas A&M University are using a minireplicon, reverse genetics system to characterize the lethal Rose rosette emaravirus. Recently, they identified three changes to the reference genome sequence that negatively impacted viral replication.
Inducing cellular senescence can provide a pathway for treating cancer. But does it cause other complications?
In 1921, at age 39, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who would later be elected the 32nd president of the United States, was diagnosed with polio (poliomyelitis). His symptoms included fever, gastrointestinal issues, numbness, and leg and facial paralysis. The disease left him paralyzed from the waist down, relying on a wheelchair and leg braces […]
In oncology, tissue biopsies are commonly fixed in formalin and embedded in paraffin (FFPE). These FFPE samples can be used with immunohistochemical or molecular analysis for identifying biomarkers that guide the diagnosis and therapeutic management of patients. This fixation technique allows long-term storage of samples but impacts the integrity of nucleic acids. This makes extracting […]
Tracking the spread of COVID-19 has been a tremendous challenge throughout the pandemic, but doing so is a key step toward containing the virus. Many communities have relied on patient testing and contact tracing, with limited success. In search of better methods, some countries have made inroads in a different form of disease surveillance: wastewater-based […]
