ILSI-Biomed Israel

Plastics that Distort DNA Readings

A new research reveals that polypropylene tubes can contaminate solutions in the PCR and distort the DNA spectrometer readings. One year ago, a group of researchers at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem reported a sharp rise in the diagnoses of a certain metabolic disorder. To those of us who live in Jerusalem, fear not. Other than the Holyland story, nothing really happened in the Israeli capital in the last year. The only change is that the lab at Hadassah changed th...

Nanodrop Vs. Regular Spectrophotometer ?

A low-budget Youtube commercial for a Nanodrop spectrophotometer gives back its money worth - and much more Kindly watch the below video. It opens up slow, and it goes on even slower, but... well, it's only three minutes!     So what do we have here? Two nerdy looking scientists, having a painfully-mock argument about the virtues of the Nanodrop spectrophotometer as opposed to using the old fashioned spectrophotometer. Let me stress that I'm all for the Nanodrop device, as it tru...

BenchFly: a Virtual Advisor for Graduate Students

BenchFly's website offers many useful tips for research and labwork, from ways of doing colony PCR to the best method to keep your waterbath clean. Protocols and techniques abound! If you’re a graduate student, doing your PhD or MSc study, you probably know by now that supervisors are not quite as useful as you would like them to be. Sure, once or twice a month you have a meeting with them, where you tell them of all the results you don’t have, and they tell you what to do next. But they ...

A New Enzyme Makes for a Hillarious Song on Youtube

Biomed is not all hard work. Sometimes, just sometimes, there are wild dances in the lab as well. Or at least that’s what Bio-Rad wants us to think in their new entertaining commercial for this PCR product. And while we’re in the musicals business, here’s another amusing film to explain what nano-technology is all about. And with muppets, too!