Top Five Blog Posts of 2023

Believe it or not, the Edvotek blog was founded in April of 2014! For a few years, it lived on our main website at Edvotek.com. That blog has been retired, and we returned here to blog.edvotek.com. In that time, we have published many articles focusing on science, scientists, learning, and education. Here are the “top five” articles that people visited on our blog in 2023. If you have any questions or teaching tips that you’d like to see featured here in 2024, let us know through this Google Form!

1. Biotech Basics: What happens if I Make the Wrong Percentage Agarose Gel? (published August 5, 2021). This blog post answers one of our most commonly asked questions about gel electrophoresis. Sometimes a student (or a teacher!) measures the mass of agarose or the volume of electrophoresis buffer wrong. Other times, they may read the wrong recipe when making the gel. These are common mistakes but not experiment enders! This blog post explains why we use different percent gels, and the accompanying video shows what happens when we run the same DNA samples through different percentage gels. 
2. Biotech Basics: Sizing DNA Fragments (published May 26, 2020). It is no surprise that another blog post about electrophoresis is in our top five! This post focuses on using the DNA ladder in two ways. First, it shows how we can use the ladder to estimate band size. Second, it shows how you can use measurements and some fun mathematics to calculate the exact molecular weight of each band on the gel. These are key skills for biotechnology success.
3. What is transformation efficiency and why is it important? (published November 11, 2021). Another key laboratory skill focuses on the introduction of foreign DNA into bacterial cells in a process called “transformation.” In practice, this is a highly inefficient process – only only one in every 10,000 cells successfully incorporates the new DNA. However, since a billion cells are used in a transformation experiment, only a few cells must take up the plasmid to achieve a positive outcome. This blog post describes how we can use the data seen on our petri plates to calculate the transformation efficiency, or the number of cells transformed per microgram of plasmid DNA. (And yes, there is a helpful video too – see above)
4. Biology Puns So Funny They Cell Themselves (published August 17, 2023). Sometimes you just need a good joke to lighten up a class — and there is good evidence to show that humor science classroom a more enjoyable, relaxed, and stress-free environment. We talk about this study in our blog post, and provide some great biology jokes that you can use in your classroom. Do you have a favorite biology joke? Let us know and we may feature it here!
5. How to Draw a Plasmid Map (published May 12, 2022). Our top blog post focuses on another important skill for budding biotechnologists, namely analyzing restriction digests by mapping the relationships between DNA fragments. This technique lets you describe a plasmid by showing the relative positions of multiple restriction enzyme recognition sites. It’s an essential skill in many research and industrial settings. It’s also a great way to get students deeply thinking about DNA and visualizing this molecule and its nucleotide sequences.

As you can see, these are great and important resources for your teaching! We hope to share a lot of interesting new content with you in 2024 as well!