Studying DNA and RNA

Overview 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 …

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overview 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 target …

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 …

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 …

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 base …

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

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