It's a New Year!

I'm pleased to announce that we have an upcoming promotional contest for all industry and research labs out there!  We want to hear about your data management horror stories in exchange for a chance to win an ipod touch or $200.  The contest will be run at www.bioinfo4u.org.  Look for it on March 1st.

Also coming up in March on the 11th is a seminar presentation in Madison, WI on effective laboratory data management.  Register at www.bioinfo4u.org to reserve your free seat to this event.

Speaking of March, that reminds me that just a little over a month until it is officially SPRING! (It doesn't mean much up here in WI, but it's something to look forward to at least.)

Brady Printer

I just had a wonderful opportunity to discuss label and printing options available for our customers with a rep from Brady.  Going forward, we hope to have all standard label types available for printing pre-formatted for seamless integration with our software.

They even have laser printing options for small or academic labs who don't have a budget or need for the BBP11 printer model! 

Our software + Brady printer + Brady scanner = One complete package for customers

Everyone from Brady has been great with helping us help our customers.  It's nice to see another company so dedicated to customer service as we are!

Now if only we talk to someone about this Wisconsin weather...

Sample Tracking and Storage

I was speaking to a company in the same building that I work in.  I learned that since leaving the clinical setting, they have been storing their sample information in an Excel database.  It came as little surprise to me that they were having trouble actually keeping track of their samples since their database had become so large. Custom Oracle database systems were too expensive for their small company, and they assumed they were faced with no other options.  It was then that I started thinking that this could really be a must-have product for every lab.

I know when I was last in the lab we barely kept track of what strains we had in house let alone who used what strain when and how often were those stocks were used! 

I looked on-line for sample tracking systems, but so far I haven't found any.  Working in a lab is so unique that the systems out there may be useful to some, but I'm not aware of any that could be used in a lab setting.

I'm currently working on putting together a general sample tracking system that we can customize and adjust for academic labs and small biotech/pharma labs.  Wouldn't it be great if a stock strain was contaminated, you could view its usage history?  View who used it and on what date and correlate that to a set of experiments based on notebook data? 

What about just all of the wasted time each day looking for materials to run the experiment in the first place?

I want to make research easier for labs so they can be more efficient and get things done.

Feel free to email me at ron@bioinforx.com or follow me on facebook

BxSeqTools now on YouTube

www.YouTube.com/user/BioInfoManagement

BxSeqTools now has 3 web demonstrations on YouTube! 

Efficient Everyday Sequencing Tools

Sequence Manipulations Made Simple

Foolproof Cloning Design Software

View the system overview, or view specific functions within the system such as sequence manipulation and cloning design.  Trust me, it took a lot longer to make these videos than it takes to learn how to use this software. 

Recently, the newest member of our team, was looking into Invitrogen's Vector NTI program.  I couldn't believe it when she told me that just the manual itself was $60!  That's more than half the price of an annual individual user account--and our subscription includes more than just one system.  Our subscription rates include all of our programs for use.

Our system is so easy to use, you definately WON'T need a $60 user manual.  I designed the system to be so user friendly that you might never open the help link...

 

BioInfoMan's Ultimate Molecular Cloning Guides

 http://bioinfoman.com/cloning_guides/index.php

Molecular Cloning Guides covers:

Subcloning:
Subcloning is a technique used to move a particular gene of interest from a parent vector to a destination vector in order to further study its functionality.

PCR Cloning:
Use PCR reactions to amplify a insert DNA fragment, followed by sub-cloning (restriction endonuclease digestion of insert and vector DNA and fragment ligation).

Gene Synthesis:
Use DNA oligos and PCR reactions to synthesize a gene without source DNA as template followed by Subcloning (restriction endonuclease digestion and fragment ligation).

TA TOPO Cloning:
TA Cloning is a subcloning technique that doesn't use restriction enzymes and is easier and quicker than traditional subcloning.

Directional TOPO Cloning:
Use PCR reaction to amplify a DNA fragment. The resulting PCR products have four additional bases (CACC) at the 5´ ends that are from the specially designed forward PCR primer. With a special ligation kit, this fragment is directly ligated into a linearized vector DNA (D-TOPO Vector, which contains GTGG overhangs at the 5’ end) without pre-digestion with restriction endonucleases. The fragment can only be inserted in forward orientation.

Gateway Cloning:
This is a cloning method based on the site specific recombination of lambda bacteriophage.