Introduction and History of RNAi
The phenomenon of RNA interference (RNAi) was discovered for the first time in nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Subsequently RNai mechanism was also found to be conserved in different organisms ranging from plants to Drosophila and Humans. RNAi is a well conserved sequence specific gene silencing mechanism induced by double stranded RNA (ds RNA), resulting in degradation of the targeted mRNA. It plays a pivotal role in regulation of gene expression, participates in defense against viral infections, and keeps jumping genes under control. While RNAi is an endogenous …

The Human Homeobox (HOX) Genes RT² Profiler™ PCR Array profiles the expression of 84 HOX genes involved in multicellular organismal development. HOX genes encode a group of homeodomain-containing transcription factors, which were initially described as controlling segmental patterning during development. Recently, their importance has been reemphasized by stem cell and cancer researches. Although these HOX genes have been grouped according to their established roles in multicellular organismal development, their true function in your cellular systems is waiting to be discovered by you. Using real-time PCR, you can easily and reliably …

Developmental biology is the study of the process by which organisms grow and develop. Modern developmental biology studies the genetic control of cell growth, differentiation and “morphogenesis”, which is the process that gives rise to tissues, organs and anatomy.
One of the important goal for developmental biologists is to understand how humans develop from a single celled embryo to highly complex multi celled adult and also to find cures to different diseases we encounter during our life span.This is all possible when one can understand the mechanisms underlying various aspects of …

Zebrafish happens to be a successful vertebrate animal model for the study of embryonic development, physiology, aging and disease.Recently ,research with zebra fish has extended to model human diseases and to analyze the formation and functions of cell populations within organs.
The popularity of Zebrafish as a vertebrate model is only next to Mouse, for performing genetic studies. Zebrafish is extensively used as a model in cancer research and cardiovascular research because they have many of the same genes we have.
Cibelli and colleagues at Michigan University has developed a new, more …

Firefox is great browser used by many and what makes it even more useful is the fact that it comes with an option of some very handy Add-ons. Some days back, Nick Oswald, editor-in-chief of the Bitesize Bio blog posted a blog entry on new Firefox Add-ons for scientists and that was a follow up to his famous post from 2007. He describes some very useful Add-ons for the research scientists and I would encourage to read his blog posts for all possible add-ons from Firefox. Today i just describe …

Generation of transgenic Drosophila is possible by microinjecting plasmid DNA containing the gene of interest into pole cells (located at posterior end of embryo) of pre blastoderm embryo. During this particular stage of embryogenesis nuclei are not surrounded by membrane (syncytium stage) and this makes many nuclei accessible for uptake of injected plasmid.
Drosophila transgenesis mainly relies on P-element, which was for the first time used by Gerry Rubin and Alan Spradling in 1982.The use of p element for transformation was a major breakthrough in the germline transgenesis in Drosophila. However …

Guanjun Gao, Natalia Wesolowska, and Yikang S. Rong from the laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, have come out with a novel technique to knock out gene of interest in Drosophila. Its called SIRT , which combines various existing methods like homologous Recombination, Site-Specific Integration, and Bacterial Recombineering for targeted mutagenesis.
In SIRT, homologous recombination is used to place a landing site for the phage phiC31 integrase in the vicinity of the target locus. All subsequent genetic modifications to the same gene …