Genomics & DNA Analysis

The use of antimicrobials as growth promoters in livestock has sparked serious concern about the development of drug-resistant strains of pathogens.

The proteome, which is the set of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism at a given time ... presents immense analytical challenges – but offers substantial rewards. Here, current approaches to proteomics, their strengths and their shortcomings, are explored.

It is now recognised that regarding a child as a scaled down adult to calculate a medicine dose may not be appropriate.

Introduced by Robert Guthrie in the 1960s, dried blood spot (DBS) sampling involves taking small drops ... of blood from either a finger prick (or heel prick in neonates) and depositing them on specially manufactured absorbent card where they are allowed to dry. Once dry, DBS cards can be readily transported by post for analysis since the components of the blood remain unchanged for several days, even at room temperature. For analysis, a portion of the blood spot is removed from the card and placed in a solvent to extract the analyte(s) of interest.

Dried Blood Spot (DBS) sampling is being adopted in drug development, paediatric healthcare, and, more recently, patient compliance.

Can deoxyribonucleic acid solve our spiralling digital data archive conundrum? Hard disc drive space is now ... measured in terabytes not megabytes. And yet still we run out of space – or money.

The horsemeat scandal has damaged customer confidence and raised food analysis awareness.

Need to conduct an experiment but lack technical capability?

The remains of King Richard III are confirmed by DNA analysis, supported by micro-computed X-ray tomography and radiocarbon dating.

At the end of 2012, uBiome launched the world’s first crowdsourced research on the human microbiome.