A Butterfly and Biotechnology

Whenever I'm made to realise that I'm not clear enough or good at something, I try to make myself clear with it. It happened today, during my laboratory examination, I was asked to perform monocyte isolation from a given blood sample, but, unfortunately, I was not very clear with the principle behind it.(but, still I managed to complete the experiment as I know the protocol, but, knowing the principle behind each step of the protocol clearly is very important, isn't it?). But, nothing is wrong in it, I made myself clear with it now. That's good, right? So, let me share with you some basic principle and protocol for isolating monocyte from blood sample. For isolating monocytes, initially we must isolate PBMC (Peripheral bood mono nuclear cells) from the blood sample. Here, let us make few terminologies clear before starting with the principle. Peripheral blood sample  - It is the blood sample obtained from acral areas of body (in general, it is the blood collected ...

Though there are several protein assays available, the most preferred one in many laboratories is "Lowry assay". It is effective in the concentration range of 0.01 mg/ml to 1 mg/ml. And, as an additional info, the paper published describing the procedure and principle of Lowry Assay is the most cited paper in the scientific history. (Feeling like, "Wow! I want to publish one to compete with Oliver.H. Lowry"???  :P) Why Lowry?   Though there are several other protein assays, mostly Lowry assay is used in many laboratories. The reasons for preferring Lowry are: sensitivity of the assay, highly reproducible, cost effective, easy to perform. Biuret assay is generally used for higher protein concentrations like tissue samples but, Lowry for less concentrated samples and hence used in most of the molecular biology laboratories where there will be need for assaying comparatively less concentrated protein samples (in most cases where we attempt to produce enzymes). Oth...

It's been a long time, since I wrote a post here. Finally, final year of my course and so very busy :) with books! And now, got time to share with you. As you know already (don't know?, then get to know :P ), I use to have favorite subjects in each semester, third semester it was microbiology, then in fourth semester, it was cell biology, fifth was molecular biology, sixth was genetic engineering and now i'm in seventh semester, but, you know what, I don't have a favorite subject!!! Don't worry that I lost interest, instead, I got 3 favorite subjects - Immunology, Animal biotechnology and Plant Biotechnology! It's awesome this time to have more than one favorite subject and here I'm gonna tell you something about, cre-lox system which is most widely used for making modifications (mostly deletions). These modifications can be done at a specific tissue alone by using a tissue specific promoter i.e., you can selectively knock out a particular gene in partic...