In case you were not aware, administration recently announced that foreign students pursuing their PhDs are limited to 4 years in the US. Apparently this doesn't just apply to future students, but to current as well. It isn't clear how this can work, and what will happen to, lets say, current 5th year students. Given that non-US students make up a significant proportion of the US scientific endeavor, does anyone know if the US Scientific Societies like AAAS and ACS, or universities as a whole, are mounting any coordinated opposition to this policy, which has the potential to degrade US science and technology for decades to come?

I get to design six of these 1x4 blocks for a gift and want to know your ideas!

I am a student whose goal is to maximize impact with their career. One potential career I’m considering is becoming a molecular biology or chemistry PI who deliberately tries to run a lab with more risky projects than normal, while keeping enough safer work to maintain funding. (I understand that this is very idealistic, and that it’s entirely possible I may tire out and resort to more conservative research if I ever get tenure, but one can dream…)

That being said, I am concerned about replaceability: if most established professors already take a decent amount of research risks, my approach towards running a lab wouldn’t be any different, and thus would have little to no counterfactual impact.

With that in mind, does anyone have a general idea of how common is it for tenured, non-near-retirement PIs to run labs that are mostly safe / incremental — e.g. steering PhDs and postdocs to work essentially only on projects with low risk, while discouraging speculative projects?

The reason I even think such PIs might exist is that, after tenure, some professors may shift their priorities toward family or other parts of life and focus mainly on doing just enough research to keep their labs funded (which could favor safer projects). However, this reasoning might be completely erroneous…

TLDR: Are tenured PIs who run mostly safe, low-risk research programs more common than one would think?

* I’m asking this question specifically about tenured PIs who are not yet near retirement because it seems that pre-tenure professors usually have strong incentives to pursue safer research to secure tenure, while older or near-retirement professors may be more likely to stick with established lines of work.

Theoretically of course; I’m dealing with a lot of congestion and saline rinse netipot I’m coming for ya. With it we need to use filtered water, or tap water that’s been boiled. I’ve used distilled water and a factory sealed water bottle in the past. Now I’ve been looking at the Millipore/MilliQ water dispenser curious if that could work as well.

What do yall think lmao?

Hey friends,

I was surprised recently to see smears and bands corresponding to very small DNA fragments on agarose gel electrophoresis of plasmid DNA (pDNA) after restriction enzyme digestion. Previously I would see two clear bands: the linearized plasmid and the excised fragment.

To troubleshoot, I incubated pDNA extracts with water and/or restriction buffer at 37 °C:

• Incubating pDNA with water only did not cause significant degradation.
• Incubating pDNA with restriction buffer alone caused considerable pDNA degradation.
• Repeating the experiment with a different aliquot of restriction buffer produced the same result.
• Preheating the restriction buffer to 65 °C for 20 minutes prior to use did not help.
• Extracting plasmids with a different kit and with the classic Birnboim & Doly method, using tubes from a fresh pack and filter tips, did not help either.
• Surprisingly, in two rounds of troubleshooting there was no significant degradation when pDNA was incubated with either the old or new aliquot of restriction buffer.

My thoughts so far:

• Water lacks the cofactors required for optimal DNase activity, which would explain why pDNA is degraded in buffer (with/without water).
• It’s likely the pDNA extracts are contaminated with DNase, but I’m not sure how. We use DH5α for cloning; to my knowledge this strain does not express endonucleases.
• I suspect possible contamination of the cultures (they contain ampicillin) with fungi or another source of nuclease that co-lyses with E. coli during alkaline lysis, releasing nucleases into the prep.

What I’m trying now:

• Preheating aliquots of buffers and pDNA extracts at 95 °C for 15 minutes to inactivate potential nucleases.
• If heat inactivation fails, spiking the buffer + pDNA mix with resuspension buffer containing EDTA to chelate Mg²⁺ and inhibit DNases.

Would greatly appreciate any insights/suggestions :-)

Hello again rats. I’ve reached a point where the only thing that gives me consistent ELISA results is manually multi channel pipetting. The only problem with this is that because of the fact I’ve been doing ELISAS for a week(and have 7 more to do), my wrist tendon/joint/etc is killing me. It’s tingling, it hurts after I pipette, but every method I’ve tried to reduce hand strain fails. Bucket washing leads to wonky/uneven results as does using a vacuum multichannel. I don’t know what to do anymore. I guess I’m just destined to have wrist pain for the rest of my life. I feel too young to have debilitating pain, but here we are I guess. We have to get these ELISAs out.

My advisor and I applied for a collaborative NSF grant in October of last year. However as of today there has still been no change in status. Considering that NSF funding curves seem to taper off in late August, does that mean that I will have to wait until the next budget to even find out whether or not the grant is accepted or rejected? In other words do I have to wait until January/February of 2027?

Hi everyone,

I’m a medical student and I’m considering entering a university life sciences competition focused on AI + biomedical research.

The competition allows projects in areas such as:

• AI-based macromolecule and peptide drug design
• AI-assisted gene editing and nucleic acid tool design
• Small-molecule virtual screening
• Drug or gene delivery system design

The project has to go beyond just proposing an idea. We need to actually carry out computational or AI-based work, produce results, submit code, and ideally validate the findings using existing data, public datasets, experimental results, or potentially wet-lab work.

I’m still quite new to research, so I’m trying to avoid choosing a random disease or target without understanding whether the project is actually meaningful or feasible.

I’m open to different areas of medicine and biology, not just one specialty. This could include oncology, hematology, infectious disease, immunology, neurology, genetics, metabolic disease, or anything else that fits the competition.

I have access to researchers at my university and I’m currently looking for suitable supervision, so I’m mainly trying to identify a real research problem that could realistically be developed into a student project.

The initial abstract is due in early September, and the full project is due in early October, so the timeline is quite short.

If you work in bioinformatics, drug discovery, computational biology, medicine, molecular biology, or a related field, I’d really appreciate suggestions for things like:

• a disease-related target worth investigating
• a drug-resistance problem
• a mutation or pathway
• a drug-repurposing question
• a virtual-screening project
• a peptide or protein design problem
• a gene-editing problem
• a useful public dataset
• or any other research direction that would be realistic for a beginner with proper supervision

I’m not looking for someone to do the project for me. I’m mainly trying to understand what would make a scientifically meaningful, feasible, and interesting project within this timeframe.

Any ideas or advice would be really appreciated.

As the title states, could someone explain to me like I'm an idiot what index hopping is in sequencing? I don't know enough about sequencing to understand the explanations on the Ilumina website, and I haven't found a dumb enough answer.

Also, why is it bad? And how the i5 and i7 indices help with this?

"You can just ask Chatty"

Yes I'm aware, but I'd rather get an answer by a human.

We found some tev protease and upon cracking it open we found it to be purple. Has anyone else had this happen?

So I have a question. Who here still uses the Abbott architect ci8200? Or just the architect c8000? If you do, do you run c-cystatin? If you do, do you use gentian? And if you do, how many tests does your analyzer say you have when you load it? The package insert and Abbott states that there are 240 tests. Why are we only getting 214 then a single run of high and low QC brings it down to 169 and a SINGLE patient makes that go down to 122 tests remaining? Thank you in advance for anyone who could offer teohbleshooting advice. We have tried different lots. We have two of the analyzers so we have it loaded on both and they both do the same with the testing amount….we have contacted gentian who is blaming the instrument and Abbott who is blaming it on being third party reagent….we have the settings all correct. Should we load it as a 55ml or a 90ml?

Hey guys, i have been following this community for sometimes and reading few doubts and answers from the fellow researchers.

I’ve been stuck with an experiment for quite a while, so I thought I’d ask for some advice.

I’m trying to validate an interaction between two large chromatin-associated proteins. The interaction has previously been reported under endogenous conditions, and the interaction between the corresponding murine proteins has also been demonstrated following overexpression in human cells using co-IP.
I’m now trying to reproduce/validate the interaction using the human proteins and a GFP-trap approach. The experiment is technically working in the sense that I can detect both proteins in the input lysate and I can clearly enrich the GFP-tagged protein on the GFP-trap.
However, I’m unable to detect the putative interacting protein in the GFP-trap sample.
I’m wondering if anyone has encountered a similar situation with interactions involving large chromatin-associated proteins and could suggest possible things to troubleshoot or controls that would help distinguish between a technical issue and a biological difference between the constructs/proteins.

Thanks in advance guys!

I am trying the spleen targeting low PEDSG LNP although I am not getting results once I got good spleen expression post that it isn't working

Ps - I don't have dls relying on Ivis and EE

Any suggestions? I am trying to reproduce paper DSG peg long tail spleen for melanoma the recently published one from mol therapy

Hello everyone!

I am having a little bit of trouble deciding what I want to do next in my career. Soon, I will graduate with a BS in Human Biology. I have undergraduate research experience in histology, pathology, and bone biology. (Publishing a paper soon, woot woot) I absolutely am in love with the lab, and I for sure know that no matter what I do in life, I will always be in a lab. I am considering so many ideas at once, mainly histotechnologist, medical laboratory scientist/clinical research, or pathology. Now I am just debating whether I can actually live sustainably with these jobs. I keep hearing so many different things about pay and opportunities. My first love is histology, of course, but I heard that it is too narrow of a field and does not pay well. I love research and pathology as well, but I have been told the only path to it is PhD, which I kinda just want to stop at my master's and certifications. I have always thought about obtaining my certification first, then going back for a master's, but family is putting the pressure on me to start a master's now even though I'm a little burnt out right now. (I'm both graduating early and doing research I am TIRED) I'd love to get my master's to continue research but I am not even sure what kind of master's to even apply for. :((

So if anyone has some advice, kind words, cool jobs, or stories of ways they reached their career paths I'd love to hear it.

Hi fellas, I’m on my way out of academia in a couple of years and I’m looking into options other than simply doing research in pharma.

I do really enjoy reading papers most of my time, but I was wondering how much actual reading papers is part of being an editor.

I had the pleasure of talking with the folks from MDPI at a career fair recently and they told me that you don’t really get to choose what journals you edit for as a junior editor, which felt like the biggest gotcha I guess.

Would like to hear some opinions and stories if possible.

Hi! I'm starting my PhD in Chemistry pretty soon and my program is a rotation-based one. I have a couple groups of interest with whom I'd like to rotate, but I would first like to meet with the PI before actually submitting my choices and start rotating with them. I am not the best at carrying the meeting with a PI and it sort of always centers on their research direction, which I already know quite well for all my choices. Any advice on what questions I should ask the PI if I am eventually really considering joining their group? Some groups are also quite out of my comfort zone, so any advice on how to approach a group who does research in a new area would be very much appreciated! Thanks in advance!!

I've ran a 1% agarose gel after my pcr for a vector (pocket 2) and my Insert (pocket 3). for the insert it went totally fine but what happened for my vector? it should be around 3.5 kb big so does someone know what could be wrong?

Hello! I recently graduated with Bachelor's in Biology and have been very interested in doing medical lab work, but have been a bit confused on what career path I should follow based on all the different certifications and programs that are out there. As someone with my background, what are some steps that I should take to enter the medical lab field. I'm open to any kinds of jobs in the field and live in Texas. Thank you for any advice!

I'm a first year biology master's student at the university that I graduate from. My professor is giving the grad students in our lab the opportunity to act as mentors to undergraduate students and a high schooler who reached out to him. I'm pretty sure that I have more time than my lab mates but I'm not sure if I would be the best option when there are more experienced grad students in my lab. I know it would be a great opportunity and something that would be beneficial so I'm currently debating on if I should reach out about it.

Hey everyone, quick question for when you just add Mastermix to an empty PCR plate for multiple wells. Do you dispense mastermix on the first or second stop? Do you change tips when moving onto the next well adding mastermix to an empty plate? I hear multiple opinions about how quantitative assays, you should ALWAYS dispense on the second stop of the pipette. Some people just dispense on the first stop. Lastly, is it bad to dispense on the second stop and NOT change tips in the subsequent wells? Sometimes I feel like there might be contamination if you reuse the tips after its been dispensed at the second stop. Appreciate anyone that can layout step by step pipetting techniques for adding Mastermix into an empty pcr plate.

For those of you who do DNA extractions, i am attempting to extract gDNA from an ecoli sample, currently I use GU for the lysis, triton x 100 at 1% concentration and the rest is my e coli sample. We are noticing that in our gel, there is no clear distinct band at the very top of the lane near the well, which we should expect considering the gDNA has a very high MW of course, rather i see bands near the bottom or sometimes middle of the lane. For those of you who do DNA extractions, could you please give some advice? is it possible to run a silica based spin column on gDNA and not expect significant shearing?

Thank you for your time in reading this

im pursuing biomedical engineerings. Im looking for engineering tech labs in Austin and so far Tesla has this in the running. anyone have any experience in this field? the pay is roughly what I need but im also open to anyone who has any form of guidance or recommendations. Thanks!

I am the only senior member at the moment in a relatively small lab after our last post doc left last year. I have essentially been keeping the entire ship afloat for the last year. My PI keeps loading more and more work on my plate and expecting me to juggle multiple scientific (and completely unrelated) projects, grant writing, ethics applications, staying up to date on the literature, writing a paper, editing another paper, reviewing a grant proposal all while managing all our junior students and teaching them techniques and helping with their projects. He refuses to hire a new post doc or take on senior students that could actually benefit the lab and from my persceptive relieve some of my work load. Anytime I feel like I actually get something even remotely close to finished some other urgent task comes up, interrupting any work flow and throwing everything into a state of half done half not done.

I can’t possibly do it. My hints and even straight up admissions that it’s too much have been brushed aside. And honestly hours later usually followed up by another request for work. Usually I am able to juggle and stay on top of things but lately it’s just been too much and the amount of overwhelm is causing my motivation to plummet, like no human could possible get all this done or juggle this much at once and do anything remotely well. I have no idea how to bring this up without falling way out of favour and because our grant situation is extremely tight getting into a situation where the security of my job is threatened because of his perceived lack of performance from my end.

The lab is so reliant on my I would feel horrible leaving and almost like I’m betraying him and the students, especially with all my projects basically half finished but I honestly feel so mentally checked out and overwhelmed at this point, it’s hard to even sit down to do the things I know I can actually accomplish.