Switching to Digital!

Dear backers, verbal supporters and onlookers:

I am thrilled to see our boat almost full, thanks to your generous support throughout the campaign, and especially during the past few days. Good job, Ziggy!

 

This week I attended (thanks, Bill!)  a very informative workshop on digital PCR held at the Slovenian National Institute of Biology, where I will be conducting most of the analyses. The highly competent and experienced team of researchers and instructors did an exceptional job presenting and discussing the uses and pitfalls of different approaches to digital quantitative PCR. This is a very interesting and potentially useful upgrade from the real-time qPCR, because it enables a direct absolute quantification of DNA molecules in a sample (without a comparison with known standard concentrations). Because it is even more sensitive than ordinary qPCR, I think it will be especially suitable for our problem. In other words, I'm sold. I will try this out on our samples. I think I can do it for almost the same price...

Something for the nerds:

•  http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122763 
•  http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b00253 
•  http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b01761