Biotech Basics: An Introduction to Cell Biology

The basic unit of all living organisms, from bacteria to humans, is the cell.  Robert Hooke first described the cell in 1665, when he used a microscope to examine a piece of cork.  To his eyes, he saw an orderly…

Biotech Basics: A Plasmid Primer

What are plasmids?  In 1952, Nobel Prize Winner Joshua Lederberg introduced the term ‘plasmid’, a double-stranded, circular DNA molecule that naturally exists in bacterial cells and some eukaryotes (Fig. 1). Plasmids have been used by molecular biologists to study, analyze,…