Enhance Your Teaching with Edvotek’s Top 10 Blog Highlights

We think the Edvotek blog is a great place to find educational content to enhance your teaching and learning. Luckily so do you! In 2024, we had more people read our blog then ever before. Here’s what the biotechnology education community found interesting.

10. Solving Your Dilution Dilemma: When asked to dilute a solution, students (and sometimes teachers) tend to panic! A dilution is a common laboratory technique used for preparing reagents and solutions. Though we all know what it means to ‘dilute’, sometimes one can be confused on how to actually perform a dilution. This blog post will walk you through all the different calculations needed to have success makign solutions.
11. A Brief History of Watermelons: Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is a flowering vine-like plant, a major global crop, and one of the best parts of summer. However, the original watermelons were small, thick-skinned, and bitter. Fortunately, five thousand years of human ingenuity has transformed this species into the bright red centerpieces of summer that we know and love. This article talks about the generations of genetic engineering and selective breeding that went into creating the delicious fruit we know and love.
12. Understanding Safety Data Sheets (SDS) and Product Labels: Student experimentation in the laboratory is an integral part of the biotechnology education. However, there are hazards in the lab, and when protocols are not followed, accidents can happen. Therefore, laboratory safety is a critical part of scientific training. At Edvotek, we always want the best for our customers, which is why we are constantly improving our products to meet their highest quality standards. You may have noticed the changes made to our component labels and our Safety Data Sheets (SDS). In this post, we will explain the importance of these changes and the benefits of the new SDS and product labels.

7. What happens if I Make the Wrong Percentage Agarose Gel?: Electrophoresis is a biotechnology technique can be used to separate dyes, proteins, and nucleic acid like DNA and RNA. Because of its ease of use and its ability to separate different molecules, electrophoresis has become one of the most common techniques used in the research laboratory. One step that’s easy to overlook is the preparation of the agarose gel. In this blog post, we discuss why we use different percent agarose gels and then we test it experimentally in a video!
8. Five Study Tips to Ace Your Lab Practical: Studying for a biology lab practical exam can be a daunting task, especially if you’re more used to written subject exams. But fear not, with the right approach and some handy tips, you can ace your lab practical with ease. This blog post features five study tips to help you prepare for your biology lab practical exam.

5. In the Spotlight: EcoRI, HindIII, and BamHI: Humans get all the credit for scientific discoveries perhaps because we’re the ones with the capacity to think and act on our ideas. Enzymes, on the other hand, are just molecules that catalyze chemical reactions and don’t have the same capacity for thought. In this blog post, we discuss three not to be forgotten restriction enzymes.
6. Sizing DNA Fragments: Agarose gel electrophoresis separates biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins, into discrete bands each comprised of the same sized molecules. By separating these important molecules by size scientists can isolate, identify and/or analyze them. In this blog post, we describe the way that scientists determine the molecular weight of specific DNA fragments

3. What is transformation efficiency and why is it important?: In nature, bacteria pass small pieces of DNA back and forth in a process called transformation, where they take up free DNA from the surrounding environment. In the laboratory, we can engineer plasmids to contain genes from different sources. In this blog post, we discuss transformation efficiency and how to calculate it with your experimental results.
4. How to Draw a Plasmid Map: So you’ve selected your plasmid and restriction enzymes, carried out a bunch of digestion reactions, and successfully run and stained a beautiful electrophoresis gel. But now how do you go from bands to a plasmid map? This blog post describes restriction enzyme mapping, which is a way to describe a plasmid by showing the relative positions of multiple restriction enzyme target sequences.
5. Biology Puns So Funny They Cell Themselves: Science jokes aren’t just about eliciting laughter (or groans); they’re also about igniting sparks of engagement and giving students a leg up on the path of learning. Humor possesses a unique ability to shift the dynamics of the classroom. In addition to lightening the mood and injecting an element of fun, humor has also been shown to increase attention and create a deeper connection with a subject. So, with no more ado, here’s our collection of science puns. We’ve even sorted them into topics for easy reference! Feel free to liberally sprinkle them into your prelabs, presentations, homework assignments, exams, and – for the especially daring among you – lectures.

We hope you continue to enjoy teaching and learning with Edvotek in 2025 and for many years to continue!