An Idiots Guide to a Biological Sciences PhD

As the newest member of the Nature Reviews Scandal team, I thought I would start off my reporting with a slightly different type of post. Here (in an NRS exclusive) I will share some simple tricks that I've learned in lab over the past few months that will help your research progress quickly. You'll be graduating before you know it!

First, when trying to prep a plasmid, make sure that you transform the plasmid into a bacterial strain that does not already have the same antibiotic resistance gene that is on your plasmid (i.e. If your plasmid confers resistance to kanamycin, don't transform it into a bacterial strain that is already kan resistant). You will not get single colonies after plating the transformation. In fact, you will end up with a lawn of bacteria and may spend a week or so trying to figure out the source of the “contamination”.

Second, when trying to clone something, make sure that your gene of interest is actually flanked by sites for the restriction enzymes you are trying to cut your gene with. If your gene of interest is not actually flanked by the restriction sites you think it is, it will not cut and will not ligate into your vector.

Third, when prepping up plasmids, make sure that you label all your tubes correctly and elute your DNA into the proper tube. Mislabeling a plasmid can lead to frustration, panic, and despair when your results suddenly suggest that the hypothesis driving your entire project is wrong. (On a related note, when you are suddenly getting results that don’t make sense, are the opposite of what both you and another person in the lab had previously seen, and are the opposite of published results, don’t panic immediately. There is a high likelihood you messed something up.)


Good luck implementing these simple tricks in your own research!