Join Us
Sign up for our feature-packed newsletter today to ensure you get the latest expert help and advice to level up your lab work.
Do you hate it when you get into the lab ready to get stuff done and then find yourself spending the first 45 minutes of the day hunting for what you need? We do too. So read these 10 tips to organize your lab space for better productivity and spend less time hunting for stuff and more time doing research.
PubCrawler automatically searches PubMed and GenBank for queries that you specify, and emails you the results, helping you stay on top of your literature searches.
The prospect of writing an entire paper can be daunting. Our guide to planning a paper will help you break the project down into manageable steps.
Working late nights or weekends in the lab—we’ve all been there. Why isn’t your cell culture considerate enough to get to exponential phase during normal business hours, anyway? Maybe you just need utter peace and quiet while you pipette hundreds of wells worth of stinky beta-mercaptoethanol. Or perhaps you’re using your wealth of microbiology knowledge…
Here we take you through 7 of the best science software apps that can save you time and money!
Does your laboratory resemble the nest of an overly enthusiastic laboratory rat that went on a scavenger hunt and squirrelled away all that it has found? Do you find yourself playing Jenga with stacks of Petri dishes and freezer boxes? Have you ever attempted to decipher the meaning of the mysterious string of numbers on…
Once upon a time, I thought reproducible research meant if someone else showed X in a paper, then I should be able to get X in my experiment. However, this actually refers to replication, an important but separate concept. Reproducible research is data analysis that starts with the raw data and arrives at the same…
During my first year as a graduate student, one of the earliest pieces of advice that I received from a senior student in the lab was to keep detailed protocols. In fact, she had a folder of her own protocols, all of them extremely detailed and riddled with notes. When she showed me how to…
Here’s a few things to take into consideration when starting up a new lab. Starting anything new is understandably overwhelming, but let’s break it down and go through the main points of designing your own laboratory. Purpose of Your New Lab The purpose and function of your proposed lab sets the course for the tasks…
Imagine pipetting your publication experiment and then your favourite lab mate has an urgent question, which of course you helpfully answer. But when you finally turn back to your experiment you suddenly are not sure which pipetting step you were at. It’s happened to us all! Efficiently keeping track of your samples in a sometimes…
Unless you are one of those rare breeds that do organization naturally, setting a system in place to archive your experiments takes practice and perseverance. It’s hard to imagine when you are doing an experiment for the 100th time that you will ever forget how to do it; but a year down the line, when…
Lab work, as we are all aware, comes with many pressures: one of which is productivity. You want to generate as much quality data as possible to meet publication deadlines or perhaps the elusive thesis. Sometimes it may feel like hours spent in the lab don’t match the amount of data produced: for some this…
It’s official. You’ve signed on the dotted line and you are about to begin the most exciting and frustrating journey into the depths of the unknown: a journey otherwise known as a PhD. You’ve heard the horror stories from previous students; the cloning that wouldn’t work for reasons unknown to man, the data that indicates…
After ten years of postdoctoral research there is one important piece of advice I would give to anyone embarking on a research career: Spend as much time managing your data as you do generating it Take time at the beginning of each project to organize how you will record what you are doing day-to-day. The…
Whether you’re already in the field or an undergrad looking to enter the scene, here are some great places to keep up to date with the latest news and trends in stem cells. Listen About It For auditory learners, or people that listen to music on their way to the lab, you could switch it…
Taking publication quality immunofluorescent images of can be a very time intensive, and frustrating process with hours spent capturing, processing, and putting the images into final figure format. And, if you aren’t careful, you can do a lot of work only to realize later that you need to re-image something for one reason or another….
You’ve got an advisor, you’re done with classes, you’ve finally passed your qualifying exams and your dissertation project is underway. Life is looking good, but it’s not too early to start thinking about how to tackle your dissertation. Chances are this is the biggest writing project you have ever undertaken, so breaking it up into…
The eBook with top tips from our Researcher community.