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As with any experiment, choosing the right personal protective equipment is essential. In this series we’ll take a look at what different types of hoods add to your arsenal of PPE, what they do and how you can benefit by using them. First, why do I even need a hood? It’s common to run a…
Having kids changes your life. I should know, I have 5 little F1’s running around. Your life is thrown into chaos the minute you hear that first cry. And it isn’t only your personal life that changes. Eventually you have to figure out how to fold your new parenting responsibilities into your lab life….
My PhD is rapidly becoming a distant memory. Before nostalgia completely obscures my recollections of this chapter of my career, I thought I’d jot down some pointers for prospective and current PhD students. These are mainly based on things I wish I had done during my PhD, or mistakes I have seen others make. I…
No matter how efficient you are, it’s always possible to improve your productivity and improving your productivity means that you get more of the rewards you are trying to obtain: results, publications… or dare I say it, money. Here are 20 ways to improve your productivity. Some are focussed toward improving the productivity of bench…
Power nap anyone? Depending on how long your commute is, and what type of transport you use, you could make your commute useful. If you are taking public transport, you can use that time to answer those emails you don’t have time to get to at the office/lab, or to catch up on reading some…
A lot of chemical reagents are relatively non-hazardous.But there are just as many that are extremely hazardous, which means you’ll want to take precautions to reduce any risk of exposure, repeated exposure, and of course, accidental contamination of anything – or anyone – that walks out of the lab at the end of the day….
Working in a lab in a developing country can be a unique and exciting opportunity for any scientist. It can be very rewarding, but also challenging as you navigate foreign settings to conduct your research. Here are ten tips for working at the bench in developing countries. 1. Expect cultural differences Everyone approaches science differently…
What do cell lysis, clean dishes, and gallbladders all have in common? Answer: detergents! These useful chemicals can solubilize fats and other proteins in water. They are the key to applications as varied as lysing cell membranes, extracting DNA, and solubilizing proteins for gel electrophoresis. To help you understand these important chemicals, we provide a…
Whether you’re a grad student or a post-doc, the decision to apply for external funding should be a no-brainer. It is in both your boss’s and your own interests to do this and will undeniably help you in future career pursuits. But before you even sit down to write, it’s important to do your research…
A few years ago, I was doing research in a lab in Ireland. Our lab, among many others, was moving to a new building. Everything was chaotic. Half our equipment was in the old building and the new lab was creepishly empty. The fire alarm went off every few days. There was a constant…
Trying a new protocol is always a little daunting, especially if no one else in your lab is doing it. So it’s always good to find a tried and tested protocol from a reputable source before getting your hands dirty. Or at least one that can start you off in the right direction. It is…
Now that we’ve learned about the role of apoptosis in good health and disease, it will be useful to know how we can detect apoptosis in cells or organisms. A variety of apoptosis detection kits are commercially available, and here is a roundup of how they work: TUNEL and DNA damage assays The TUNEL assay…
It’s ironic how much folklore and superstition comes with being in science. “That’s a lucky pipette”, “playing Bach for your cells will help them grow”, “always make your own solutions”; we all have our own tips. Some of them might be well-founded others not so much… Tips from trusted colleagues can be very helpful though….
A lot of scientists hate presenting posters. Because more often than not, you stand near your carefully designed, full of great results placard, all alone, while there is a crowd gathered two posters down. There are some conclusions you could come to: My own case study In the last two years I presented two posters…
Your stomach clenches. Sweat snakes down your torso. The world seems to slow down. You begin the long, terrifying walk down the corridor. Your mind calls out to you to, “Run! Run now!” but you soldier on until you reach the door and knock. There is no escaping the wrath you will evoke when you…
Life in the lab is easy-peasy when you are only prepping a handful of tubes. But what if you need to scale up to 10’s or even 100’s of samples? Scaling up your experiments can have some expected and some not-so-expected, leaving you in a lurch, consequences. Read through our tips so you aren’t caught…
Your lab is full of non-chemical hazards that can explode, stab, kill, and – as if that wasn’t enough – bite. Here’s a list of those hazards to remind you why Environmental Health & Safety exists! 1. Centrifuges Centrifuges are dangerous, especially when not cared for! An unmaintained ultracentrifuge imploded in an American lab in…
The thing that was most difficult for me as an R beginner was plotting graphs with error bars – there is no concise way to do this with base graphics. There are workarounds, often using the ‘arrows’ command, but isn’t there a simpler way? Yes, in fact there are a handful of plotting packages for…
More than a pun on the explosive growth of sequencing data, BLAST makes annotation and comparisons of similar sequences much easier. Created by a group at the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information in 1991, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool is arguably the most heavily used tool for sequence analysis (that’s available for free,…
Most of us hate cleaning and are often hard pressed to find time to clean our homes, never mind our laboratory space. However, an annual spring clean and maintenance of a regular cleaning rota/regime will contribute to an efficient, organized and harmonious lab environment. This is increasingly important in communal lab spaces where multiple staff…
My mom is a microbiologist and so I was a lot more informed about bugs than most kids. In fact, I probably gave more than one classmate nightmares with my talk of there being 10 times more bacteria that make up the human body than human cells. I remember my mom working by a Bunsen,…
It seems like every movie that needs a shot of a scientist doing their sciencey-thing either gets the person to pour one pretty liquid from one flask into another or to stare intensely at a test tube with a look of knowing so much more than you ever could. Another favorite shot is of someone…
We’ve been slowly coaxing you along in our R tutorials. We’ve introduced what R is, gave you a basic tutorial into how to use R and also spent some time learning how to explore your data with R. By now you are probably itching to use R for more complicated analyses. To indulge you, I…
Like athletes running on turf versus sand, the gel you run your DNA through can highly affect your results. The two main types of gels that people use for DNA electrophoresis are agarose and polyacrylamide (PA) gels, but figuring out the differences can be confusing. Basically, you choose a gel based on two main factors:…
Grad school is a big investment of your time, with a lot riding on a successful relationship with your mentor. Unfortunately, you may have realized that the relationship is not working and resists improvement. You’ve taken the steps to switch to a new mentor. Now comes the hardest part. What do you actually say to…
Run to red! It’s a mantra I learned when first using gel electrophoresis to separate DNA molecules. This can save you a lot of frustration and humiliation in the lab (stage right: a complaining scientist who swears the equipment is broken as a supervisor facepalms in embarrassment). But what about how does this jell-o like…
Here are five unfortunately easy ways to wreck a centrifuge, and how to make sure it never happens in the first place!
Much of your success and happiness in grad school depends on an effective relationship with your mentor. Despite your best efforts, sometimes the first relationship doesn’t work out, and you need to switch mentors to succeed in your program. But how do you prepare to change mentors mid-PhD? Step 1: Write it all down Before…
People often joke about hiding from sales reps, but the fact of the matter is that valuable opportunities are lost when scientists disappear into thin air. Think twice before attempting your own vanishing act; a brief chat could reward you with amazing deals, introduce you to faster, better technology and keep you in the loop…
Grad school is a long, hard, long, time-consuming, and–wait for it–long process. A bad relationship with your primary mentor can make it worse, and may even drive you away from a science career. Unfortunately, you often can’t spot incompatibility until you’ve spent time with a mentor and lab. Even then, how do you tell the…
What did we do before the internet? And where would we be without handy online molecular biology tools? Apparently in the ‘olden days’ doing a simple gene or protein alignment required programs that used dynamic programming algorithms such as the Needleman-Wunsch and Smith-Waterman algorithms. These required long processing times and the use of supercomputers or…
As you’ve probably kind of guessed from our previous articles Introducng R and the Basic R Tutorial, we think R programming language and R-studio are great tools for data analysis and figure production. And now we are about to prove it! So, you’ve collected some data and are pretty sure you know what statistical test…
Freeze-thaw—you know it’s bad for your samples, don’t you? While working in the lab, you have most likely heard someone say ‘aliquot your protein/cells/DNA/RNA to avoid too many freeze-thaw cycles.’ But do you actually understand why? You probably thought that avoiding freeze-thaw cycles had something to do with damaging cell structure as well as proteins…
Resolve lab obstacles with creative solutions with these non-lab products that can actually be very useful in the lab environment.
The relationship you have with your supervisor during the course of your PhD is a critical one. Like all other personal or professional relationships it can range from being harmonious to disastrous. Choosing a supervisor you think will work well with you in the first place is important, however it can be difficult to foresee…
Figures play a central role in science not just as a way of displaying results, although this is obviously important, but also as a way of getting across complicated theories and processes in a relatively simple and direct manner. I’m a firm believe in the power of putting ideas into diagrams and spent a considerable…
A variety of lab supplies can be purchased off the shelf in your neighborhood, which can save you time and money. Here is a grocery list of items that you can stock your lab with today!
So you’ve performed a test such as an ANOVA and have found that there is statistical significance in your data (lucky you!), however you now want to know where that significance lies. When you are comparing multiple sets of data it might seem like a logical thought to simply perform an individual t-test between each…
The great thing about being a scientist is, well… that you get to be a scientist! And it can be fun and rewarding. But being a scientist can be a nasty stressful business too. As I come to a turning point in my ‘academic career’, I find myself making mental notes of the pros and…
Last week I focused on the left-hand side of this diagram and talked about statistical tests for comparing only two datasets. Unfortunately, many experiments are more complicated and have three or more datasets. Different statistical tests are used for comparing multiple data sets. Today I will focus on the right side of the diagram and…
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