Scientists create recombinant DNA by combining DNA from different sources—often, other species—in the laboratory. DNA cloning allows…

DNA isolation protocols can be fast and straightforward or complex and time-consuming depending on the type and quality of DNA required for further…

Restriction enzymes are bacterial enzymes used to cut DNA in a sequence-specific manner. To cleave DNA, they bind to specific palindromic sequences…

Agarose gel electrophoresis is a laboratory technique commonly used to separate DNA fragments by size. However, it can also be used to isolate and…

DNA probes are fragments of DNA labeled with a reporter tag to enable their detection or purification. The resulting labeled DNA probes can then…

Agarose gel electrophoresis is very useful in separating DNA fragments by size. Running a DNA ladder containing fragments of the known length…

Microarrays are high-throughput and relatively inexpensive assays that can be automated to analyze large quantities of data at a time. They are used…

Only genes that are transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA) are active, or expressed. Scientists can, therefore, extract the mRNA from cells to study…

Fluorescence in situ hybridization, or FISH, was developed in the early 1980s and has quickly become one of the most widely used techniques in…

The polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a widely used technique for copying segments of DNA. Due to exponential amplification, PCR can produce…

Real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, or Real-time RT-PCR, is an analytical tool used to determine the expression level of…

Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends, or RACE, is one of the most effective methods to obtain a full-length cDNA from an mRNA sequence between a known…

DNA sequencing is a fundamental technique that is routinely used in the biological sciences. This method can be applied to a range of questions at…

In the same year as the discovery of the Sanger sequencing method, another group of scientists, Allan Maxam and Walter Gilbert, demonstrated their…

The first human genome sequencing project cost $2.7 billion and was declared complete in 2003, after 15 years of international cooperation and…

RNA sequencing, or RNA-Seq, is a high-throughput sequencing technology used to study the transcriptome of a cell. Transcriptomics helps to interpret…

The genome refers to all of the genetic material in an organism. It can range from a few million base pairs in microbial cells to several billion…

Relative to the issues of off-target effects and the difficulty of inserting a long DNA fragment in the application of designer nucleases for genome…

Photolithography is a powerful technique for the synthesis of DNA oligonucleotides on glass slides, as it combines the efficiency of phosphoramidite…

Fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) is a molecular technique which enables the detection of nucleic acids in cells. DNA FISH is often used in…