| 20% DMSO?! |
[Jul. 9th, 2009|04:11 pm] |
Some computer guys sent PostDoc a list of molecules that, according to their calculations and the crystal structure, should fit together. They even did the preliminary testing, and got beautiful results.
PostDoc has given me the job of finishing up the screening assays, and my results agreed with PostDoc's results, which is that these molecules are Crap. When asked why the difference, he shrugged and showed me their protocol:
They ran their reactions in 20% DMSO
in a buffer loaded with salts
with levels of reactant heretofore never seen, much less published
and the list of wrongs went on and on...
Which lead me to reflect upon the paradox of pharmacology: it's very broad, in the sense that it encompasses all questions of "What does X do to living system Y?" but at the same time, almost mind-bogglingly narrow, in that the protocols that we and just about every other pharmacology lab use have been handed down for generations and nobody bothers to change them.
It also lead me to the following gripe: if you don't know what you're doing, stand back and let the 'perts take care of it, so that the same work doesn't have to be done twice and we don't have to yell at you for being idiots. 20% DMSO?! What on earth were they thinking?! |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|08:54 pm] |
Does anyone know of a place where I might order a plastic, squeeze-operated wash bottle with a head on it with 8 little tips, such that I can wash a 96-well plate by hand? We have one in our lab, but it has absolutely no maker's info on it whatsoever, and I can't figure out exactly what to call it, so all my searches of Fisher's website are turning up nothing.
' |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|10:56 am] |
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Why do people never empty the little bench top coolers used for restriction enzymes, instead they load them up with the ones they use and just store them like that, fuckers, then I don't have a cooler when I want to set up a digest and if one of the re's I use is their favorite one, I always have a little heart attack when I can't find it in the general box. |
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| A Gripe on Behalf of My Grad Student |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|05:06 pm] |
Today, I taught the grad student I work with (who's from Korea) that "sheet" and "sh*t" are pronounced differently. Unfortunately, this was after he presented a microsoft excel spreadsheet to most of our department.
The professors took it in stride, but a lot of the other undergrads were laughing, and not nicely. I wanted to stand up and ask them how many foreign languages THEY can say "spreadsheet" in. It amazes me how immature some people still are.... |
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| Low =/= gone |
[Jun. 29th, 2009|08:46 pm] |
About three weeks ago I sent an email around, asking people to please keep an eye on the levels of our common-use 10X buffer and the filters, and to please alert me when things start running low, so that I can make the time to make more buffer and cut more filters. I mean, I keep an eye on these things, too, but sometimes a few days go by when I'm not in that particular lab, and right now we have an extra 4 summer students so things can run out fast.
Apparently people think low = "almost gone".
And hence, this post: When I have a million other things to do is NOT REPEAT NOT a good time to find out that "Oh, we're down to the last two filters and the last liter of 10X buffer". (2 filters is not enough to most of the experiments, and 1 L of 10X is gone faster than you'd think) These things should never be so low that I MUST make them up NOW--because, hehe, if I were running a time-sensitive experiment today, whoever asked me to make them up would be screwed. |
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| Foreign Journals |
[Jun. 26th, 2009|05:44 pm] |
edit: Paper received thanks!!
First time I've had to resort to begging the internet (ie you) for a paper my not-normally-crappy institute library doesn't subscribe to (and doesn't even have on its library catalogue).
I'm after:
Expression and function of CD28 on Epstein-Barr virus-positive B cell lines and AIDS-associated non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cell lines
Widney D, Boscardin WJ, Kasravi A, Martinez-Maza O
Source: TUMOR BIOLOGY Volume: 24 Issue: 2 Pages: 82-93 Published: MAR-APR 2003
A pdf sent to doctorbob.nospam (disposable email address and this set of brackets should fox the spambots!!) at ntlworld.com would be fabulous if anyone's a subscriber!!
I can tell the journal's foreign, 'cos they can't spell tumour correctly
</snobbery> |
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| Anti-gripe |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|12:50 pm] |
Where I work, there are two regularly-scheduled breaks every day. These are just what they sound like: someone brews some coffee or tea and we all talk about the weather or something like that. Of course, just because they're regularly scheduled doesn't mean everybody regularly goes; my own attendance at these things is spotty at best, and many of the people here don't show up at all.
The PI has just made Monday morning coffee breaks "mandatory" (as in "please try not to have anything like a kinetics experiment scheduled for that morning"), and wants to institute a rotating schedule for bringing in cookies/cake, too. Gotta hand it to him--there are worse ways to start the week :-) |
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| Stupid question.... |
[May. 29th, 2009|02:44 pm] |
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It's Friday and I need some extra validation. I have some 4X LDS buffer and some 10X Reducing Buffer I use for my SDS PAGE samples. If I use this LDS buffer at 1X it kinda sucks at weighing the sample down. I'd like to add more. I don't think it'd make a huge difference, but someone please reassure or correct me. |
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| You know you have been in lab too long when... |
[May. 26th, 2009|04:23 pm] |
You scrape the chocolate off the bottom of you coffee cup like you would scrape a cell culture dish. Too many wells to scrape 0.0
Speaking of scrape small wells (ie 24 well plates) does any one know of a good cell scraping mechanism for these kinds of plates? I can't change the plate size due to a volume set up we have but scraping each well with a P-1000 pipette tip is getting rather hard on the hands. |
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| Why? |
[May. 26th, 2009|04:39 pm] |
Why did I come in today?
Thanks to some fubared thingum with the trains, I arrived an hour late. Found out, upon arriving, that last night's electrical storms in the western part of the country did something funky to the train lines.
Because of the electrical storms, the counter stopped working, and was only just restarted this morning. The counter has been busy, because everybody and their mother has experiments going.
Meaning that I didn't get my results until noon. Now, had this been any other experiment, I would've said, "eh" and went on, but this happened to be one of those preliminary tests where the future rests upon the results. So I had to analyze my data and crunch the numbers before I could even think about starting any real work today.
Meaning that I don't get to leave until 6. And if I'm lucky, I'll catch the 6:22.
Did I mention it's a 2-hour commute each way for me?
Anti-gripe: Cryptonomicron is a lifesaver. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 19th, 2009|04:01 pm] |
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Has anyone ever used WaxFree DNA Kit? Is it any good? |
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| My Simple Little Project |
[May. 15th, 2009|03:04 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  faintly amused | ] |
I've been given a "simple little project", and like all my projects, this one starts with stock solutions. I have to make a stock solution of theobromine. Ideally it'd be a 40 mM stock. So, according to the protocols this lab follows, I put it in DMSO.
Nope.
Well, okay...try the Tris solution we use as the reaction buffer.
Nope.
Do a little Googling, find out that theobromine is insoluble in many organic solvents and barely soluble in water, and certainly not in the concentrations that I'd like to have it. But OK, we can deal with a 4 mM stock solution--but then it'll probably fall out of solution at the temperatures we store it in...
"Simple little project", my @$$--if this is the start, God knows how it's going to end |
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| Questions Answered. |
[May. 6th, 2009|09:39 am] |
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When I first started in labs, I often wondered why people bought stir plates instead of the stir/hot plate combo or why companies bothered manufacturing one or the other instead of both at the same time. Today I learned that it is possible to mistake the "stir" knob for the "hot" knob and melt the plastic racks haphazardly placed upon them and shut down an entire lab for a whole day. |
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| Gel Photography |
[May. 6th, 2009|04:32 pm] |
The gel camera on this floor broke, and for some obscure reason it hasn't been fixed yet. There's another gel camera two floors down, but it's giving the guys hell in regards to getting their photos in digital format. It's printing just fine, though
So today, I noticed one of the guys (BE) with a digicam, walking about and taking photos of everyone. Another one of the guys, MA, happened to be in the room.
Me: why do we have a digicam?
MA: for the gels?
Me: you've got to be kidding me.
BE: wanna see something pretty?
Me: [thinking it's a photo of the guys, and MA's being his usual Eyore self.] All right.
BE: [show photo of a gel.] |
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| Creativity in science |
[Apr. 30th, 2009|09:53 pm] |
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Does anybody know any course in creativity in science? I'm interested in this theme. Many thanks! |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 29th, 2009|09:22 am] |
I'm relatively new. I've been reading but never posted before. I have a problem that maybe someone here can help me with.
I doing DNA purification for frozen whole blood samples. However, about 1 in 3 samples always has protein contamination. I'm following the protocol. For the last sample I did protein precip twice and couldn't see anything. However when washed the DNA in ethanol there was protein. The nanodrop read protein contamination for all four samples. Any idea? How does anyone else deal with this? |
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| Days off |
[Apr. 28th, 2009|10:06 pm] |
I've never been less pleased to have time off. Mostly because the dates of the holidays fall mostly on Tuesday and Thursday this year. Plus I've got mandatory meetings of various stripes to attend, and a job fair to attend. I have to do several experiments to an n=3, whatever touch-up experiments PostDoc needs, and some transformations for plasmid cloning (3 days). And, just to make things that much better, our newest PhD student has filched my computer, but I don't know if it's worth kicking up a fuss about because I might be starting a new job in a few months.
IOW, I'm not getting anything done in May, and everybody who's depending on me to get results is sh*t outta luck. |
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| More of an anti-gripe: lab meeting |
[Apr. 22nd, 2009|06:19 pm] |
It's my turn to present at lab meeting next week so today I started the powerpoint presentation of my data. Generally, in months and years past I didn't have much data so I presented a paper or mostly background information. Today I copied and pasted background info and posted almost entirely new data. I even left blanks for data I just now acquired so that I can fill it in when I finish my analysis tomorrow. Strangely I feel like I'm growing up as a scientist when I can leave blanks for tomorrow's data in next week's presentation. :-) It's kind of like that feeling I got after my first experiment that actually generated a graph (as opposed to just cell pictures from the microscope). :-) |
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| Fail |
[Apr. 22nd, 2009|10:14 pm] |
This week, Big Name Scientist (BNS) is visiting our lab, and my PI made arrangements for him to stop by and chat with all of us, presumably on our projects. For some reason, this included the lab techs--i.e., me and T. T has been doing stuff directly for PI, so there's at least a possibility that PI failed to mention her work in previous meetings with BNS, but me? Both PhD and PostDoc have had hour-long chats over their respective projects, so BNS probably knows more about my projects than I do...I get the feeling that I somehow failed to make any impression on him, which I suppose is better than making a bad impression.
I've also got two job interviews coming up. One is tomorrow, and it's in a nephrology lab. And I just know that one of the questions is going to be, "So, why nephrology?"
So, what answers SHOULDN'T you give to that question?
ETA: Thanks for all your hilarious answers! I'm somewhat pleased to announce that I still have some dignity after that interview, but of course they'll "be in touch". |
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| A quick question |
[Apr. 22nd, 2009|02:29 pm] |
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I'm submitting a manuscript for publication, and the journal wants 'generic' chemical names. Does anyone know what ABI's Big Dye Terminators (v. 3.1) actually are? I've got everything else down but this. |
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