Troubleshooting Transformation

Reproduced from Life Technologies, Inc.

Shanta Dube
Technical Services
Life Technologies, Inc.
Rockville, Maryland 20849


If you are getting low transformation efficiency with chemically competent cells:

If you are getting low transformation efficiency with electrocompetent cells:

If you are getting all white colonies, but your clone does not have an insert:

If you are getting all blue colonies with recombinant DNA:

If performing large-scale plasmid preps, you have cell death or low cell growth with decreased plasmid yield:

If you see an opaque colony:

If your restriction endonuclease is not digesting DNA:

If you get extra bands that migrate faster than supercoiled DNA on an agarose gel and are resistant to cleavage by restriction endonucleases: