Elie Diner

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Power of Personalized Skincare: How Beauty is Changing | Thermo Fisher Scientific - UK

Today’s consumers of beauty products don’t take anything for granted. Now more than ever, they care where ingredients come from, how they’ve been sourced, what their impact on the planet is, and above all, whether or not they do what they say they do. Marketing claims that sound “too good to be true” or are based on pseudoscience, ring alarm bells, which can lead to widespread rejection in the marketplace. To adapt to this new landscape, cosmetics and personal care manufacturers – from global co

Powerful Applications for RNA And DNA Modifying Enzymes | Thermo Fisher Scientific - UK

Basic biological questions have yielded a wide variety of cutting-edge applications for today’s molecular biologists and diagnostics or therapeutics developers. Projects that began more than 50 years ago with a simple biological question – how does bacteriophage T7 initiate a switch from early transcription genes to late transcription genes – led to the discovery of T7 RNA polymerase (RNAP). [1] Through additional work, T7 RNAP spawned the implementation of now-ubiquitous methods, such as in vit

Disease Detection and Genomics in Agriculture | Thermo Fisher Scientific - UK

Plant and animal domestication and cultivation have enabled humans to live and spread across the globe, reaching a current population of 7.9 billion people.[1] This process has been facilitated by sophisticated science and innovative biotechnology, both of which have been accelerating along with humankinds’ growth. With the population forecast to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, a question is ever-present: How is our current agriculture capacity going to grow to support the projected 2 bi
Life in the Lab •

6 reasons to automate your sample preparation workflows

Automated sample preparation has filled a gap the occurred when the volume of labs processing samples skyrocketed starting in 2020. But as the volume of samples requiring nucleic acid extraction and analysis grew, labor shortages occurred. Therefore, lab automated instruments able to reduce touch time and perform automated sample prepation like nucleic acid extraction, immunoprecipitation, sample transfer, and cell isolation were more necessary. Depending on the needs of individual labs, small t
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Dynabeads and Immunoprecipitation: Your Questions Answered

Immunoprecipitation (IP) is a valuable tool for studying protein-protein interactions across various fields. And though the procedure involves a simple, well-established protocol, generating accurate, reliable, and repeatable results requires attention to key details. Reagents with rapid binding kinetics and low nonspecific binding are critical for high yields and precise data. InvitrogenTM DynabeadsTM magnetic beads are nonporous, uniform, superparamagnetic, monodispersed polystyrene beads wid
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Keeping the Lights on for SARS-CoV-2 Research

LAMP Assays and surveillance of infectious disease: Keeping the Lights on for SARS-CoV-2 Research Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) is widely considered the “gold standard” for infectious disease research.1 The technique enables small quantities of RNA or DNA to be sensitively and specifically detected through exponential amplification. With the re-emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the adoption of qRT-PCR-based research was relatively rapid, given the existing infrastructure and foundational place i
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Cell isolation with Dynabeads

How to Get the Cells You Need with Dynabeads? Conventional cell isolation procedures can be time-consuming and delicate. Nevertheless, with Dynabeads cell isolation, you can observe reproducibility and quality for positive selections, negative selections, and more. See how to level up your cell separations. The separation, isolation, and analysis of specialized cell types is an essential part of basic biological research, therapeutics discovery and development, and clinical diagnostics. Glean
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The human microbiome does WHAT

The human microbiome has mushroomed from a little-known, niche field within microbiology into a rapidly evolving and expansive research area of its own. This explosion has been driven by the availability of scalable nucleic acid extraction kits, low-cost next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms, and robust bioinformatics pipelines. Consequently, it has provided deep insights into the complexities of microbial communities. Not surprisingly, microbiome research has focused primarily on human ph
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14 Tips for a Successful RNA Extraction

Even the most experienced molecular biologist has screamed their favorite expletive during an RNA extraction. To a non-scientist, it can look like this poor person is losing it, yelling at an innocent tube, filled with clear, nondescript liquid. But to those scientists who have experienced the many woes of RNA extraction, it’s easy to empathize. Outpourings of anger (also known as RNAnger) are a natural and common side effect of working with RNA. And it’s understandable: Low extraction yield an
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How to Automate Your SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Testing Workflows: 4 Key Questions

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a year of innovation never before seen in the biotech and pharma industries. From the rapid development and manufacturing of novel mRNA vaccines on a global scale to the creation of myriad diagnostic tests, our scientific community has helped protect against the current and continued threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The discovery that SARS-CoV-2 viral particles and fragments are shed in the feces of COVID-19 patients, led to the inventive use of wastewater testi
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5 Benefits of Saliva Testing: Why it’s the Next Big Thing for In Vitro Diagnostics

For a multitude of different diseases, from diabetes to cancer, early intervention is key to limiting morbidity and mortality. In vitro diagnostics that sensitively detect disease-specific biomarkers are central to timely diagnosis and successful treatment. While IVDs have been powerful for healthcare providers, there are still significant limitations preventing the rapid detection of disease for the global population. These challenges, outlined by Lee and Wong, fall into three major categories
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What is saliva and why is it important for diagnostics?

Aside from when we lick a stamp, get a whiff of greasy fast food, or hold our mouths open for a routine dental cleaning, we typically don’t give saliva more than a fleeting thought. In the diagnostics world, the same has been historically true: Oral sample types, like saliva, have been ignored and undervalued, reserved only for tests for oral infections or cancers.1 But over the past decade, there’s been a major sea change in salivary diagnostics and saliva has quickly risen as a sample type wi
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How to Get More Out of Your Saliva Collection & Handling

How to Get More Out of Your Saliva Program: Powerful Considerations for Saliva Collection and Handling Compared to traditional biofluids (i.e., blood), oral biofluids, such as saliva, hold a lot of potential for diagnostic testing. Saliva collection is minimally invasive, safe, and can be done quickly and in a variety of settings, giving it a big upper hand over (often) painful blood draws, which need to be done in a laboratory setting by a medical professional.1-3 Yet much of saliva’s potenti
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The Future of Saliva Biomarkers in the Clinic

The Future of Saliva Biomarkers in the Clinic Compared to other biofluids, there are numerous benefits to using saliva for diagnostic testing. Saliva collection is non-invasive, biomarker testing is low cost, and diagnostics can be as sensitive as tests that rely on traditionally-favored biofluids, such as blood. With saliva testing for SARS-CoV-2 growing in popularity and serving as a definitive proof point, salivary diagnostics are uniquely positioned to continue their ingress into the clinic
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Triumphs for Saliva as a Diagnostic Fluid

Using Saliva as a Diagnostic Fluid: 5 Triumphs for Salivary Biomarkers For most people, saliva is written off as an inert (kinda gross) fluid, necessary for food digestion. But for researchers, it’s increasingly being appreciated for its molecular complexity and the potential for DNA & RNA extraction and analysis, proteins isolation, and small molecules to be used as biomarkers for oral and systemic diseases. While the diagnostics community has long been hesitant, over the past two decades, acc

Three Ways Gibson Assembly Strengthens CRISPR Workflows | Thermo Fisher Scientific - UK

Harnessing the power of CRISPR with recombinant DNA Wielding this technology, either for preclinical R&D or therapeutics development, requires the ability to manipulate and test various Cas proteins, sgRNAs, and other genes common in molecular biology, including fluorescent or luminescent reporters, promoters of different strengths, transcriptional terminators, and more. Accomplishing this requires a modular approach to constructing recombinant DNA, a robust cloning workflow, and rapid access t

Best Oligonucleotide Purification Methods for Your Research | Thermo Fisher Scientific - UK

Synthetic DNA oligonucleotides are used broadly across many different application areas, from basic R&D to clinical diagnostics and biotherapeutics. Their meteoric rise to modern-day ubiquity had humble beginnings as a synthesis puzzle for organic chemists, with no clear application in biology [1]. But widespread adoption of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s opened up and rapidly solidified their place in biology. Today, DNA oligonucleotides are foundational for genetics and genomics, wher