Invitrogen's TOPO TA cloning kit is pretty fantastic for doing subcloning of PCR products. I've used it for pretty small products (<150 bp), and it works beautifully!

My lab does tons and tons of western blots, and I gotta give a shout out to Cell Signaling for their primary antibodies.  Very few of them actually suck, and the ones that do, nobody else makes good ones either.  We study the PI3K/mTOR pathway (among other things) so if you need an any advice on good ones let me know.  Their secondaries are very good too, but pity they don't make many species, just anti-rabbit and anti-mouse. One Christmas Cell Signaling ran an awesome promotion something like $25 iTunes gift card for $200 of product, or something like that....the whole lab got $50 gift cards that year, since we stocked up on things we knew we would use.

Recently I've been trying some Epitomics monoclonals, and the 2 i've found have been hits: TSC2 and phospho-ATM (however this only works for human, as the datasheet indicates).

We also buy gels from BioRad, and don't have any complaints. In general they seem pretty reliable, and our rep will give us free ones if we occasionally have problems.

Dharmacon is my fave source of siRNA - the SMARTpools are what I normally get.  Usually I see no increase in efficiency beyond 10nM making them last a pretty long time.

 

 

For peeps using antibodies, you might check out Biolegend. They carry a lot of the same clones as BD Biosciences at about 1/2 the price--and that's before any discounts, which if your dept. or institution orders regularly you can often get. Generally the quality is very good, comparable to BD, and you can usually get free test samples. From what colleagues have said, they're an excellent resource if you're doing flow cytometry, because they have so many antibodies in so many different colors, plus they have experienced folks on staff that can help you set up multi (e.g. 14)-color flow setups. The only downside is that currently most of their products are for immunology (e.g. cell surface markers, cytokines), but they're expending their range of cell signaling antibodies.

The SNAPid works great. Once you adjust your antibody concentrations to meet the technology, the bands are perfect. I've found I even get a little higher sensitivity than I do with traditional methods.

@BiochemBelle I reuse them 5-10 times too. I just soak them overnight in DI water after I use them. I've never had any problems doing it that way. It's super amazing!

Well, now you've gone and upped the ante, Jason. I mean, really, how are we supposed to top military grad nightvision goggles? And don't even try to pretend that you don't use them for covert tag.