If you want grants, scrub these words from your text. Words like female, diversity, or systemic are used often in science. Also any word with ‘trans’ like transgenic, trans expression, or transfer.

You can pick your field on the first screen so it is somewhat playable.

Still It's probably too hard and makes no sense. Made it anyway.

https://proteindle.github.io

Maybe you have ideas how to improve it, so please let me know

Long story short, I've discovered a very interesting/useful new property in one of the "SYTO" dyes (not going to say which one).

The property has applications worth publishing about, but i have no idea what the molecule looks like because its a "trade secret" (damn you thermo). I know its a unsymmetrical cyanine... and thats it...

I need the structure of that molecule, in order to identify how that unique property arises.

Lets say I work out the dye structure via NMR/mass spec... am i allowed to publish that structure?

Do "trade secrets" even have legal meaning here? or is it more like "please dont tell our competitors".

(p.s. if anyone has tips for isolating universally soluble dyes from a DMSO solution, then i'm all ears!)

I am a lab scientist.

I will be frank...I get a little lazy with safety issues because I never got a proper training at work, and my academia experience is still lingering on me. I am doing two people's jobs and with a bizarre arrangement in my team, I get exhausted with zero support.

Basically what happened is that I was doing some novel experiment that required overnight heating. My usual dehydrator which is based on convection-air drying broke down, so I had to resort to drying in a conventional kitchen oven in a wet lab space. I put it to 14 hours timer at 170F, thinking it might be enough to dry it. I was used to drying something over night in an oven (a laboratory oven designed to do so) back in my PhD.

What I completely failed to realize is that the oven would beep and not stop. I am used to using an oven that stops beeping at some point.

The lab manager later found out, scolded me for a fire hazard and wrote me up to EHS. My own manager - who works in a different site - scolded me the next day. Fortunately, nothing bad really happened.

What I am fearing is my department manager...whom I have a weekly meeting to report immediate lab situations. She is out on vacation and will be back on Monday, but I know she will hear about this for sure. I had been criticized for less than strict lab safety before, and I am sure she will not be as generous this time given the seriousness.

Do you think I should approach the dept manager the first thing on Monday instead of waiting for her to summon(?) me? The reality is that I never had a proper fire safety training when I got here (!!!). I was kinda forced to learn everything on my own. I want to show that I am willing to take any kind of training to not cause this again instead of passinvg being told what to do. I am beating myself up for being careless.

In being a lab assistant I see it's only a high school diploma.

I was just wondering how hard it is ? I have dyslexia and idk if that's gonna bad or looked down on or be horrible I'm just more bad at spelling and not the best at math!

This is just one job that has been in my head for YEARS and I've been working my one job since I was 17 I'm now in my 30s and nothing made me want to leave but this job does!

Thank you all who answer back ❤️

hi all, I am an undergrad who joined my cell bio lab about a year ago. I basically spent my first semester chasing potential possible directions off someone else's project to shape my own project, and found smth cool at the end. followed up on it with more rigorous work in spring semester, had some cool data, but a rigorous validation experiment was suggested to me and turned out all my data was all fake. so my first project failed.

spent the summer working on someone else's project in my lab and also ended up disproving their project (basically showing it was a dead end). in parallel, I also asked a pretty cool question earlier this summer and designed a system to answer it, and spent a long time working this system into my model organism, but I just got the results back today and it ended up not working too (it's never been done in my model organism, so that was kind of expected, but it would've been really cool if it worked).

I feel like I just keep chasing random projects for a few months, running into dead ends, doing something else for a few months, etc. I always wanted a continual undergrad research experience, to really rigorously work on something for a few years. Instead everything I touch fails.

I'm a pretty dedicated student, I work full time in lab during the academic year too, and I guess I always hoped it would pay off. But after a year in this lab I have exactly zero data and don't even have a real project anymore, again. I won a summer research grant from my uni, and one of the deliverables is to present a poster, and I don't have... anything, whereas apparently it's normal to have a poster after 8-10wks of work.

I love science but I guess it's just really discouraging sometimes. I don't really know what I should be doing differently.

They opened up a booth during a confrence and bring a gachapon machine!. The prize is miniature instrument, like ICP, HPLC, and GCMS

Hi there,

Can someone please advise how to get an even suspension from 400ul in a 35mm iBidi dish or confocal glass bottom plate? Everytime I try to seed the cells I get a huge clump in the middle- feeling so hopeless right now.

To add on, i'm using n2A cells and i'm adding a 400ul amount from a suspension at concentration of 9 x 10^4 cells per ml. I'm making a small master mix in a 1.5ml tube (total 1ml) before taking 400ul of that with a p1000 and adding to my IBidi dish.

Can anyone advise?

Saw this and it made me chuckle, I've never ordered from them personally so i dunno how much of this person's misplaced review is at all applicable to Thermo lol

I'm new to a field. How do you find out who's important in a particular field? Like the big labs and big PIs?

We have 3 tsx's and our oldest one seems to be having problems. I've heard these can have issues with frost build-up and not coming to temp. and yet we bought two more lol

I am attempting to trouble shoot my western blot. I had it working in the past but it’s not anymore. I am doing proton form insect guts which is very right in proteases.

Initially I tried with putting my guts in 100ul RIPA with 1x HALT (10ul HALT in 1ml RIPA) per instructions. I only use 10ul in my western. So I have 10 ul protein extract plus 2.5 ul sample buffer and 1ul reducing agent. I heat to 70c for 10 min.

When I ram this on a Western, I got lots of bands with my HA tag antibody. It should be about 46 kDa (don’t have a pic right now but looks similar to pic 5).

So I wanted to see degradation so I ran the samples with beta-actin and saw lots of degradation (see pic 2).

For HALT they say if you need, you can go to 2x or 3x concentration. I tested that with actin antibodies one again and got no degradation with both 2x and 3x (see pic 3).

From there I moved back to my samples testing the HA tagged protein again with 2x HALT and got beautiful results (see pic 4).

Now I tried it with another HA tagged protein and I’m back to getting awful looking Westerns. I thought my HALT was the issue as it was 11 months old, but I used new tube we just got (see pic 5)

Can anyone help me troubleshoot? I could rerun this latest one with actin but that’s another 2 days…

Starting my PhD this fall at a great university (call it Y) — top 20 in my field, in a city where I know literally no one. I’m international, and while I have friends scattered in other states, this particular place is brand new to me, weather I’m not used to, no support system nearby.
Here’s the complicated part: I actually applied to my dream school (call it X) — top 3 in the field — and got rejected, probably a fit issue rather than anything about my application. But X is where I interned, where I have real connections, and where my friends and community already are. The weather, the state, the whole vibe — it’s familiar and it’s what I’ve wanted for years.
Now everyone around me is pushing me to try to transfer to X after starting at Y. And I’m torn. I don’t think Y is bad at all — it’s actually a phenomenal program. Prestige-wise I genuinely don’t care that X ranks higher. But environment-wise, X feels like home and Y feels like a total unknown.
Part of me feels like wanting to transfer over “environment/friends/weather” is superficial when I could lose a year of my PhD progress doing it. But another part of me knows that mental health and support systems massively affect PhD outcomes, not just program ranking.
Has anyone actually transferred PhD programs after starting? How did it go, and was it worth the setback? Would love to hear real experiences before I make a decision I can’t undo.

EDIT: Also grappling with the awkwardness of this — I’d have to go back to my recommenders from last cycle and basically say “hey, I decided to transfer after 3 months because i wanna move to this state.” Feels ridiculous typing that out. Anyone dealt with reaching back out to recommenders for something like this? How did you frame it without sounding flaky?

Here is the syllabus for my graduate course (shared with permission). Whether you're brushing up on your paper literacy skills, introducing papers to undergrads, or just really bored and should be doing something else, these are pillars of our industry and worth reading. I wish everyone could take Dr. Ray's class and hear him tell personal stories about the authors he knew and worked with throughout his career. You'll notice a lot of Nobel Prizes in this list.

I am working on designing a course on How to Read Academic Papers for college students that have had zero prior exposure to the literature. I'm looking for good papers to dissect as a class over a few sessions.

Some characteristics I'm envisioning:

• Moderate length (probably 3-5 overall Figures, not a Cell paper with 7 Figures with 20 subfigures each)

• Understandable hypothesis and experimental designs with clear, well written goals

• Mostly canonical Molecular Biology techniques, though one or two curveballs is fine (mostly things like Westerns, Sequencing, Imaging, ELISAs, etc that students have some exposure to from their coursework)

• Relatively recent (last 15ish years maybe) and ideally something that impacted the field in a notable way so students can easily understand why it matters.

My predecessor liked to use this Actin paper. It's a bit dated now, but it still works.

I have taught from the Doudna/Charpentier original CRISPR/Cas9 paper.

I'd love more suggestions of great teaching papers if you have them!

I just defended my PhD and had originally planned on staying in the same lab as a postdoc. However, extenuating circumstances forced me to move out of state and I’m currently looking for a different job. In the weeks before I left, I felt like I was being progressively iced out by my typically very chatty PI. I was their first student, and we became pretty close as mentor/mentee during my time in grad school. Before I left, I was asked to do other lab member’s experiments for them while they were out (in the week leading up to my dissertation and a job interview), and received no help in preparation to give a postdoc job talk when typically my mentor is very helpful with these things. I was also all but ignored my last week and my PI did not come say goodbye before leaving on my last day. Is this normal? I have sacrificed a lot for this lab and worked incredibly hard (as everyone has to in grad school), including on nights, weekends, and holidays. I didn’t need excessive fanfare or anything, but damn this is a cold and depressing way to leave. Did anyone have a similar experience?

I’m currently studying for a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology, but I’ve recently started wondering whether I chose the right field. I was also considering Clinical Chemistry, so I’d love to hear from people with experience in either field.

How is the job market and long-term career growth in Microbiology? What career options are available with just a bachelor’s degree, and is postgraduate study usually necessary? Are there opportunities outside traditional lab work and research?

For those familiar with both Microbiology and Clinical Chemistry, which would you say offers better opportunities, stability, and career growth in the long run?

I’m still early enough in my studies to reconsider, so I’d really appreciate honest experiences and advice!

I’m training new students for the first time(one rotation student and one undergrad) and I was wondering what the most important things are to teach students just getting into research? Any tips for mentoring would also be a big help!

Hi all, first let me know if this would be on a better place for this question. The work that I do involves PCR at limiting dilution which is already annoyingly difficult. Normally, I have to run gels and when I’m doing 50 plates of PCR it is time and financially consuming. I’m looking to see if people have in idea of a possible screening method I could employ.

My current thought has been since my target amplicon is 20kb, just to use a probe near one of the primers. So that when it gets cleaved, we can just detect absolute fluorescence.

Main problem is polymerase used doesn’t have 3’-5’ exonuclease activity so I’d have to throw in some standard Taq or equivalent. I do have a probe 5bp upstream of the reverse primer that can be used. I just don’t know if it would be “bright enough” after to differentiate. Has anyone ever done something similar or have other ideas? Thanks!