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In this installment of Teach Me in 10, Dr Wintermute provides a Synthetic Biology 101, teaching you everything that you need to know about this interesting area of science, in less than 10 minutes.

What does the COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy actually mean? It's not what you think. Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past two weeks, you probably heard the great news that two of the leading vaccine contenders for COVID-19 have had some amazing initial results. Jeff Galak debunks some of the most common incorrect interpretation of those efficacy numbers and then explains to you what they actually mean.

In the last week, twin announcements from Pfizer and the Gamaleya Institute have suggested a vaccine for COVID-19 will prove effective at cutting infection rates. With only a minimal amount of analysis released, can we get excited about 2021 yet?

Vaccines usually take decades to develop – so how is Oxford University's ChAdOx1 nCoV-1 vaccine trial moving so quickly? It comes down to careful planning, extraordinary logistics and a whole lot of help from partners around the world.

On 23 March 2020 the Wellcome Sanger Institute began preparations to sequence the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2. The huge logistical and technical operation was set up in a matter of weeks. This short film gives a glimpse of the work going on behind the scenes, from Stores to DNA preparation, from sequencing to data handling.

Some people think that Dynabeads magnetic beads are expensive, while slurry is typically considered to be cheap. Watch the video to better understand how to calculate the actual cost of your immunoprecipitation experiments.

Is it really necessary to pre-clear your sample prior to immunoprecipitation? Watch the video and learn how you can avoid background without any pre-clearing.

What are selfish genetic elements? How is synthetic biology working to create them, and what role might they serve in pest control?

Natural resources are always limited, so the right strategy decides success. This also applies to spore-forming bacteria. Bacillus subtilis can survive unfavorable living conditions by forming endospores. A time-lapse microscopy study suggests that the bacteria can either make more or better spores, and that natural isolates follow different life cycle strategies.

Traditionally data acquisition has been the bottleneck for large scale proteomics. This has also remained one of the limitations in leveraging mass spectrometry within the clinic.