I recall having to make hundreds of custom peptides, and even though we used an automated peptide synthesizer rather than doing it by hand like another lab in the building, making a dozen peptides at a time still took hours on the machine and then another couple days for the purification and lyophilization processes. My mentor and I briefly joked about using bacteria and a polycistronic construct to just have the little guys use their ribosomes to do it for us, but the purification process probably would have been impractical. This does make me appreciate the wonders of natural biosynthetic machinery, and I promise there is a point here because we still use animal hosts to initially produce antibodies. Today, let's explore the process by which most commercial and custom antibodies are still produced, including here at ABclonal!

We live now in a polarizing environment where many people can't agree on issues that may seem obvious for the greater good, and part of that is likely due to a mistrust of scientists depending on one's education level and political leanings (probably the most diplomatic way I can phrase this). Science has brought us many wonders, from faster transportation, to lifesaving medicines, to the devices you are using to read this right now. Science also works to continue building our knowledge base, and perhaps one of the greatest examples of this is the banning of leaded gasoline, highlighted in an amazing episode of Cosmos hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Because proper regulation is needed to keep both society and science in check, I thought today we would explore how science works with the law to ensure a brighter future for humanity.

Computers are ubiquitous in our lives now, particularly the majority of us who have a miniature supercomputer in the palm of our hands. With more efficient and powerful computer technology coupled with the understanding that biology is much more complex than dissecting out the role of a single protein in a signaling pathway, the relatively new field of computational biology and bioinformatics has exploded over the past few decades as researchers needed new tools and strategies to understand biology on a systems level. This has allowed non-traditional professionals to enter bioscience research, from primarily computer scientists to bench scientists who have taught themselves coding and statistics. As the computational component has permeated through nearly all of modern biology, we realize that there is a beneficial coexistence between the experimentalists and the keyboard warriors who make sense of growing datasets.

I'm a big proponent of telling fun stories, particularly about science (and sometimes baseball), and in just plain having fun, which I think is a good way to go through a life that is all too short on the geological scale. I also like staying in touch with my friends and making new friends, because a life well lived includes all the fine folks we've met along the way. As you may have seen in our other communications, we are getting set to launch a new podcast series we have named "BioChat," because we are going to be talking with a lot of folks who are associated with bioscience research and work in service of promoting better health, stronger research and clinical outcomes, and ensuring improved quality of life.

As a scientist (or at least, a guy who likes science and works for a bioscience-oriented company), I am invested in the power of scientific research in improving the quality of human life across all arenas. It is particularly gratifying when our customers, who are all primarily research scientists, derive direct benefit from ABclonal's products in their published research. In this case, our business development director had a customer recently defend her thesis based on a publication that used several ABclonal catalog antibodies. I enjoyed reading her group's article that may lead to more effective treatment strategies for diabetes patients going forward, so let's get to it.

With the holiday season upon us, it is a time to relax and be among loved ones again as we recharge for the push into the new year. Along the way, we have learned quite a bit about medical advances and new discoveries into life processes, information that will be used to drive the next stages of innovation. One of the great perks of having been in an academic setting was the constant immersion in ideas and collaboration, but even though some of us are no longer connected directly to academia, the vast interconnectivity provided by the internet means that we are never too far away from good information that could teach us something new and exciting.