Hi everyone! I’m a #NewPI just starting my lab and would love to hear your advice on lab management and building the lab culture. Any tips, lessons learned, or resources you’ve found helpful are very welcome! Feel free to reply, message me, or email me at rcastellsg(at)cnio.es
thanks a lot!! 🤗
thanks a lot!! 🤗
Comments
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37039597/
Train people to work of the lab protocols and record any deviations.
Eg a table with sample ID, conc, volume of lysate, volume of bufer.
Rather than saying run a Bradford to determine protein concentration say:
1) Dilute lysis buffer 1:50
2) Put 95 uls of diluted sample in well 1 of 96 well plate.
3) Put 30uls of diluted sample buffer in wells 2-5 of the same plate
5) Serially transfer 30uls to wells 2-5
...
Newer trainees might not know that they need to dilute the lysis buffer to match the diluted sample, or might not know that prediluted standards don't work the same as freshly diluted.
We've got a great example, where we thought we'd optimized a protocol and a summer student used a different volume of drug in his dilution series. This made a big difference.
Made it into one of our published protocols:
I
Absolutely, feel free to share.
You never know when some politician is going to decide your particular field of study is "woke" and defund/ban/publicly excoriate it. Always be Minutes away from making all of your work public/accessible to high school students.
Also, my thesis experiment had the power supply on a RAID controller catch fire and kill 32 "redundant" disks at once. But a curmudgeon had insisted on backup-backup disks, which lived in his office in a different building. Nine months' data saved.