The Central Dogma-rama
The type of spontaneous chemical bond that holds two complementary strands of DNA together.
What is a hydrogen bond?
The specific whole-blood component layer that serves as the most abundant source of genomic DNA.
What is the buffy coat?
The direction nucleic acid fragments migrate during electrophoresis due to their net negative charge.
What is toward the anode (or the positive pole)?
The specific chain-terminating nucleotides modified in classic Sanger sequencing to determine base identity at exact positions.
What are dideoxynucleotides (or ddNTPs)?
The baseline genetic condition that defines a human cell harboring exactly four homologous copies of every chromosome.
What is tetraploid?
This cellular location is where the enzymatic joining of amino acids into protein chains takes place.
What is the ribosome?
The chemical reagent added during organic isolation protocols to successfully denature proteins and fully inhibit destructive RNases.
What is guanidinium isothiocyanate?
The standard chronological order of the three steps that make up a baseline PCR cycle.
What is denaturation, annealing, and extension?
This variant nomenclature type describes a sequence change where a codon like UGG changes to a stop codon like UGA.
What is a nonsense mutation (or premature termination)?
The specific cellular repair pathway where hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risk genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2 normally function.
What is homologous recombination repair?
This term describes how most amino acids are coded by more than one RNA sequence.
What is degenerate (or redundant)?
What you must do if a blood tube and its requisition form have mismatched patient names.
What is discard the sample and notify the supervisor/physician?
The specific artifact produced during a PCR reaction when primer pairs share sequence complementarity at their 3' ends.
What are primer dimers?
A physical distortion in a double helix caused by hybridizing partially complementary nucleic acid strands.
What is a heteroduplex?
The phenomenon where triplet-repeat expansion conditions like fragile X show an earlier age of onset or increased severity across generations.
What is anticipation?
These short, discontinuous fragments of DNA are synthesized on the lagging strand during DNA replication.
What are Okazaki fragments?
This mathematical measurement of multiple control runs determines the overall liquid delivery precision of lab pipettes.
What is the standard deviation?
A quantitative real-time PCR metric defined as the exact cycle number where a target reaction achieves a set fluorescence threshold line.
What is the threshold cycle (or Ct)?
The targeted sequencing method that relies on detecting miniature shifts in structural pH rather than capturing raw fluorescent dye signals.
What is ion conductance sequencing?
The diagnostic identification of an anomaly where a heterozygous locus displays only a single remaining allele in a patient's tumor cell population.
What is loss of heterozygosity (LOH)?
The punchline to the molecular biologist's pick-up line: "Are you DNA helicase?"
What is "Because I want to unzip your genes"?
Drinking an unlabeled liquid in a lab is far more likely to result in this than gaining superpowers.
What is an emergency call to Poison Control (or getting a severe safety write-up)?
This 1993 Spielberg sci-fi franchise relied on amplifying dinosaur DNA extracted from prehistoric amber insects.
What is Jurassic Park?
Maternal mitochondrial DNA was used to identify an unknown child victim of this 1912 shipwreck.
What is the Titanic?
The real-world scientific reason a TV detective cannot use an autosomal DNA profile to tell identical twins apart.
What is identical twins share identical autosomal DNA profiles?