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Serious errors plague DNA tool that's a workhorse of biology
Researchers analysed thousands of laboratory-made plasmids and discovered that nearly half of them had defects, raising questions of experimental reproducibility.
The study shines a light on “a lack of knowledge” about how to do proper quality control on plasmids in the lab, says Hiroyuki Nakai, a geneticist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland who was not involved in the work. Bruce Lahn, chief scientist at VectorBuilder, a company based in Chicago, Illinois, that provides gene-delivery tools, says that he and other biologists have been noticing problems with plasmid quality for years. Another way for labs to avert issues is by publicly sharing their plasmid sequences in open-access repositories, says Melina Fan, chief scientific officer of the non-profit organization Addgene in Watertown, Massachusetts.
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