Technical question for MoBi people

[amethyst73]

I'll pose the general question first, on the chance that more people might have opinions about it:

What forum(s) have you used to ask questions about technical molecular biology stuff? Were the answers to your questions useful? I'm taking a look at BioTechniques, Molecular Station (which doesn't looks very useful), and biowww.net as possibilities for posting the question below; I don't really want to spam a gazillion lists.

Second, the more specific question, which I somehow doubt most folks here will have an answer for, but I'm posting it anyway:

I'm cloning PCR products into Invitrogen's pCR8/GW/TOPO vector (a TA cloning vector with Gateway recombination sites) in their TA cloning kit.  I've cloned about 8 things so far, and in two of them I've had the following problem: somewhere in the actual cloning, a few bases (9 in one case, 5 in a second) are removed from the end of the PCR product and the vector.  Has anyone else had this problem?  Recommendations on how to avoid it?

Comments

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

I'd ask you!



Good luck! :)

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

oops, it ate my fake html tag, which was supposed to be < / unhelpful > without the spaces.

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

Heh. Oh well!

[emilymorgan.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday!

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[cookie107.livejournal.com]

Don't have a great source for the first, as I left the world of MoBi back in grad school for Enzymology, but I'll ask the husband if he's got any ideas. For the second, Invitrogen has awesome technical service--since it's happening with their kit, try asking. Odds are it has happened to other customers and they may have a work-around. I use the vendors to solve my problems whenever confidentiality allows for it!

[amethyst73.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Yeah, I was thinking I should contact them. :)