I have a life sciences background and experience building and running businesses. I’m looking to get involved in a new biotech venture and would like to meet potential cofounders with complementary scientific or technical experience.
Where would you suggest looking, particularly if you’re no longer working in academia or part of an existing biotech company?
Are there communities, programmes, events, or other routes that are useful for meeting people who are seriously interested in building something?
I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who found their cofounder outside their existing network. How did you meet, and how did you figure out whether you’d work well together?

I'm Alex, a genetics PhD at UCL researching cancer evolution. I made this visual introduction to connect changes in individual cells with the behaviour of a whole tumour.

It follows an illustrated melanoma through clonal diversification and spread, then discusses targeted-treatment resistance, TRACERx and experimental adaptive therapy. The central thread is how inherited variation provides the material for selection, including selection imposed by treatment.

One example is imatinib resistance: the early Gorre et al. study identified both an ABL kinase-domain substitution and BCR-ABL amplification in relapsing patients. Primary paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11423618/

The melanoma animation starts at 4:30; the imatinib example at 8:55. This is an introductory explanation, and the description includes sources and qualifications to the simplified examples, including that a BRAF mutation alone usually does not produce melanoma.

I am seeing this severe sample failure in ddPCR that I have never seen before. Please see attached plots and additional information below

Normal passing sample:

Sample Failure:

All QC controls that all behaved normally. Then wells contain gDNA extracted from PBMC cell pellets using the Applied Biosciences KingFisher™ DNA Ultra 2.0 kits sold by thermo are failing with the appearence of severe diagonal droplet plots suggesting droplet instability. Replicate samples inconsistently show the issue even on the same plate. There appears to be carry-over of the issue across wells. Failure observed across 2 sets of droplet generators/ddPCR readers. The master mix for ddPCR includes up to 250ng gDNA from this extraction, supermix, restriction enzymes, our HEX and FAM primer/probe mixes, and water.

What is very strange is that the issue distinctly appears part way through reading each well, suggesting a failure at the time of plate reading the continually happens or carries from one well to the next. This issue has been observed in 4/5 recent runs. Anyone seen this before???

Thank you in advanced for any similar experiences, failure hypotheses, and troubleshooting suggestions.

I have been doing some work in scRNA and found so many mis-labelled samples, Noticed there is no ubiquitous tool.

So I built one has over 10k+ samples across 10 vendors with accession and emits the right structure to 4 different pipelines for easy automation.

Keen to hear everyone's thoughts

it's Apache 2.0 License keen to hear your thoughts!

https://github.com/Tussl-Co/TusslChemistry

Hi

I was hoping someone could help. We are running some calibrations for a Quantstudio 12K flex system. We are running the ROI calibration with a purchased plate. And it runs all of the calibrations fine except the last one where it fails. The image looks very bright as though the plate surface is reflecting a lot of light back. It does say that this filter is sensitive to dust etc, so we ahve cleaned all of the optics that we can clean but it still looks "whited" out. Anyone know what this might be due to? Weve run the background calibration plates (the next step) and these all look fine. Any help really appreciated!

Hi, I am new to CRISPR and want to KO a gene in HL-60 cell line. I don’t think we have the skills to do it in house so wanted to have an outside company do the cloning and packaging for us. Do you guys recommend a specific company. Who we’ve been looking into is ABM, if anyone knows/recommends them. Thank you!

Hello everyone,

I am from Vietnam seeking advice from seniors and researchers on how to continue pursuing a scientific career in the biological field, specifically in infectious diseases and molecular biology.

Here is a brief overview of my background:

• Academic Record: BSc in Biotechnology with a GPA of 2.91/4.0 (7.36/10).
• Research Experience:
  • 2 years as an Undergraduate Research Assistant focusing on multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes.
  • Over 1 year of experience working with bacteriophages. My wet and dry lab skills include phage and bacterial isolation, extraction, characterization, and Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) analysis.

Currently, my research outputs primarily consist of novel case studies and reports on specific MDR bacteria and phage strains, which might not be prominent enough for high-impact journals. Given the limited funding and infrastructure for structural biology and transcriptomics in my home country, I am wondering if exploring molecular mechanisms solely at the genomic level is a feasible and sufficient direction to build a strong research profile moving forward?

I am planning to apply for a Master’s program in Molecular Biology or Infectious Diseases in Germany (I am particularly interested in the University of Würzburg) or in Taiwan. Prior to or during my Master's, I hope to have an internship to deepen my expertise, with a strong focus on bacteriophages and phage-bacteria communication.

Thank you so much in advance for your time and guidance!

I'm comparing human tissue suppliers for a translational research project, and sample availability is only one part of the decision. For those who regularly source human tissue, what do you check before placing an order?

Hello, I am a college student in Mexico and I want to improve my knowledge in molecular biology. But I dont have any books to start and i would love to kno what book you guys think I should read to better understand molecular biology. If i am able to get it in Annas archive would be great.

Hello! I need some help coming up with an idea for my final degree project in Pathological Anatomy and Cytodiagnosis.

The project must focus on a real problem related to this field and propose a practical solution, ideally by creating or developing something that could help solve the problem. It could be a simple device, a tool, a prototype or an innovative idea that improves an existing process or makes a task easier, safer or more efficient.

I am looking for something realistic, useful and feasible to develop as a student, but also original and creative. I would really appreciate any ideas or suggestions for problems that need solving and possible ways to address them.

Thank you very much for your help!

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I hope everyone will be fine , i just wanna to do a work on the spinal cord injury, recovery through stem cell research, due to the limitations of the requirements/ environment , The work is only rely at the mata Analysis, if the genome wide analysis,

Let me know what i can do so i should capable of finding the good pathway or directions for my research, if anyone has experience previous I'll very thankful for him/her for the guidance ,

This project matter's alot for me so please come those who have experience, or just an idea about it's,

Hi! I recently finished my Biology degree and am looking to join one or more journal clubs that bring people together to discuss new papers on scientific topics. I am mostly interested in genetics, evolution, aging, development and stem cells, but I would gladly accept recommendations for any other related fields!

Does anyone know of any online, virtual, or active communities (such as Discord or independent reading groups) where recent graduates or students meet to discuss recent papers and preprints? Any recommendations or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!