Articles by Jeremy Peirce

If you thought transposons were mere genetic curiosities, think again.

Researcher Willy Walter of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has fairly typical gel-documentation needs: "We take pictures of ethidium bromide-stained agarose gels using a UV transilluminator and of yeast colonies under white light."

As yesterday's genomics breakthroughs become today's common laboratory techniques, the cutting edge of biology is increasingly found at the level of the proteome.

THE POWER OF PHYLOGENY:Studies of the β-globin gene promoter illustrate the power of phylogenetic footprinting, and the importance of species choice in that analysis. (a) Transcription factor analysis of the human promoter without footprinting reveals numerous predictions, most of which are biologically irrelevant. (b) Comparison with the chicken promoter fails to detect conserved sites, but comparison with the mouse promoter does (c), including a documented GATA-binding site (boxed). (d) C

Figure 1Lab shutterbugs looking for new gel-documentation systems this year could be pleasantly surprised: Manufacturers are selling better cameras at lower prices. With companies now offering a largely common set of features, competition will center on cost and improved imaging equipment. And that's a good thing, because rapid developments in imaging hardware mean that last year's dream system is likely to be this year's budget-minded purchase.Imaging hardware ranges from simple scanner-based s

Courtesy of UVItec  UVItec's UVIscan system Most life scientists own lab notebooks bursting with Polaroid film, each frame capturing a piece of agarose-embedded information. Whether those images are priceless or mundane, crystal-clear or blurry, all are one-of-a-kind: Spill a cup of coffee on the notebook, and a piece of data could be lost forever. But thanks to digital gel documentation systems, such worries are receding. "Basic documentation systems have become commodities in the labor

Photo: Courtesy of Applied Biosystems The Auto-Lid Dual 384-Well GeneAmp PCR System 9700 from Applied Biosystems. Used to be, researchers used thermocyclers for PCR. But times have changed. Once called PCR machines thermocyclers are now required for a wide range of common applications such as sequencing and genotyping. Murray Anderson, director of core PCR for Applied Biosystems, Foster City Calif., observes, "When we first launched the dual 384-well [thermal cycling] systems, the primar

In 1906, Mikhail Tswett separated plant pigments on a chalk column. Alluding to the separated colors, he termed his technique chromatography.1 Nearly a century later, chromatography hasn't changed all that much; it still relies on the differential affinities of analyte components for the mobile and stationary phases of the separation. Yet in high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), the technique assumes a decidedly high-tech air, with gleaming stainless steel components, computer control

Colony counting and colony picking are widely recognized as boring, repetitive tasks. In 1963 Joshua Lederberg noted, "The most tedious operation in bacterial genetics is counting-colonies."1 So it is not surprising that researchers have a strong desire to automate the process. The first commercially available automated colony-counting system was produced in the 1970's, according to Michael Zervoudis, sales and marketing manager at Gainesville, Va.-based BioLogics. Artek Systems, BioLogics' pred