The pH meter is probably the least understood and most abused piece of equipment in the biological lab, probably because it is an undercover agent from chemistry and only a rare biologist likes chemistry. Look over there, it stands in the corner of the lab, covered in dust, glass probe encrusted with crystals. In a [...]

Why confocal? The standard fluorescence widefield microscope described in our last article has one major disadvantage: it collects not only the desired image information from the focal plane, but it also records a large amount of out-of-focus light, leading to a blurred image. In the 1950’s, system developers started thinking about how to get rid [...]

Think before you start! Before you even start preparing your samples, you should think about the choice of microscope for image acquisition. Manufacturers offer an ever increasing range of light microscopes- some of which may already be available in your research institutes. To help you get the best out of your imaging experiment by making the [...]

As we learned in my previous article, cell culture hoods have many names. As if that wasn’t enough, they are all-too-often misunderstood and mistreated, which can lead to dangerous situations harmful for both the worker and the general lab environment. Here are three common ways that workers abuse biological safety cabinets; make sure you don’t [...]

Biological safety cabinets, laminar flow hoods, clean hoods and culture hoods are all common names for those essential pieces of equipment that you use in cell culturing. The terms are used inter-changeably, but in fact there are lots of different types of culture hoods, each of which does a different job. Knowing which is which [...]

Is there anything more tedious than pH-ing a solution? Standing there adjusting the pH of your buffer, adding acid or alkali drop by drop until you get to the right pH… With pH-ing being so boring, it’s in our best interests to keep the equipment in good working order so that we needn’t fuss over [...]

There’s something disconcerting about going to incubate a sensitive and irreplaceable sample in a water bath, only to be confronted by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Unfortunately, water baths are an inviting habitat for all kinds of life, are often shared by many users, and are a perennially unpopular item to clean.  To help [...]

Several years ago as a freshman in a research lab, the very first project I received was to pipette incremental micro-volumes of H2O onto a piece of parafilm. Boring! Weighing the liquid on parafilm and comparing the weight between 10 replicates for each micro-volume continued for a week before I touched anything else in that [...]

You might be proud of your pipetting skills (if not, check this out), and be churning out data faster than a liquid handling robot, but beware… you might also be pipetting yourself out of a job. I almost did. Pain due to pipetting is common; Hand pain is reported by 90% of people that pipette in continuous [...]

Everyone loves a bargain! These days, more and more labs need to stretch every dollar as far as it will go. So how do you keep your lab well-supplied on a tight budget? To get a better deal on products you might choose to shop around, buy in bulk or haggle with vendors. However, if [...]