Life Science Tools of the Trade

Ever have an urge to paint your pellet? Me neither. Pellet paint from www.emdbiosciences.com is one of those products that I rarely use but every few months when I am precipitating a critical sample (forr example some mRNA isolated from some rare monkey tissue that I really don’t want to lose because the boss would kill me and I’d have to kill another monkey) I get it out of the freezer. Okay, I don’t really kill the monkey myself but I do request the tissue and I always wonder how much my monkey meat order influences the decision to execute little Bonzo.
Back to the details: Add a microliter of pellet paint along with the usual salt and 2 volumes of ethanol, freeze and spin. You’ll see a tight dark pink pellet which is the paint and your DNA or RNA. The pellet paint has never interefered with a downstream application and that includes RT, cDNA synthesis and cloning. I can’t remember how much it costs and one tube seems to last a lifetime.