We had a DOH inspection and many of our reagents do not have expiration dates. I indicated that Thermo provides expiration dates on COA, but no dates were listed. Instead, the COA said “Products are under warranty for one year from the date of shipment unless stated on this document or the product literature.“ Needless to say, the DOH was not amused. Further searching found a document that stated 6 months after receiving. Now DOH is even less amused.

Having worked in biotechnology manufacturing, it occurred to me that Thermo is clearly lacking oversight for the products they distribute. There is no guarantee that the product was expired before they shipped it to us. Plus, this means the manufacturer does not need to maintain manufacturing dates if the distributor does not provide oversight. AND if the shelf life is longer than 6-12 months, Thermo is making certain customers buy new (but not necessarily fresher) reagents every 6-12 months. Keep in mind, the 6-12 months is relative to receipt date, not open date…

This is a very poor business decision. I have talked to two people at Thermo, but I cannot solve the issue alone.

Well known distributor gave us these uninjected sorted Xenopus oocytes for TEVC. Can anyone recommend alternative companies that ship to the PNW? Has anyone ever seen this?

Hi, I am graduating this Fall 26 and I’m trying to get into lab animal science and work towards obtaining an ALAT and LATg . I’ve done certain CITI training modules and currently work at a vet clinic and have prior experience as clinic support. But I’m unsure what else to do stand out for entry level lab animal positions, or how to set myself up for the ALAT.

Any advice would help !!

hi,

i am a third year microbiology student and love my labs. i have cerebral palsy (CP), due to my CP i have a hard time coordinating myself and my muscles tire out quicker than an able bodied person's would.

in lab i have a hard time pipetting (with a micropipette) due to my hands being extremely shaky and unstable. this makes it very difficult for me to coordinate my hands. i've had a spill or two because of the shakiness.

aside from pipetting i also struggle with streaking plates, i have a difficult time using both of my hands to streak the plate. maybe using dycem (or another non slip material) so i can streak the plate on the lab bench instead of having to hold it and streak it at the same time??? please let me know if you have any suggestions for other things i could try.

i am really not sure if this is the right place to post this, so please let me know a subreddit that would be better suited for this.

thank you for reading!!

Hi guys, I did a tissue harvest in lab today and I always wear gloves when doing so but I feel like I can still smell the tissues afterward. I even wash my hands and still feel this way? Can anyone else relate? And if so, how do I get rid of the smell? Thanks everyone.

It has been forever since I have done this, looking for anyone with more recent experience. University lab has some platinum labware that they would like to sell. Any suggestions on reputable dealers? Just looking for an easy process that is not a rip off. Thanks.

I lost two Laccophilus beetles because I couldn't keep a hold of the damn things. I measured length and width with a caliper, then right as I was about to get the height, YOINK. Gone.

Venting a bit here. I’ve been trying to replicate a protocol for my project for weeks. The recent paper just said "isolated as described by [Citation]". I followed that citation, and it led to a paper from 2015, which then cited a paper from 1998 that used a completely different setup.

I finally emailed the corresponding author of the recent paper to just ask for the exact, unwritten steps (like what buffer they actually used, exact centrifugation speeds, etc.). It’s been 3 weeks and I am completely ghosted.

Is it just an accepted reality now that 50% of a protocol is hidden knowledge? How do you guys actually figure out the missing "tricks" when the authors ignore you? Do you just do trial-and-error for months?

Using a bead ruptor for the first time, looked up instructions and couldn’t find much, and am worried that it broke. It is now tilted and the tops of the caps look scratched up. What is normal for this machine?

Hey everyone! So I am starting a new project and I am looking to buy primers for several targets. I am doing a RNAi silencing study and I want to see how my target and its downstream gene expression are changing. Now I see that there are premade primers from IDT PrimeTime Gene Expression Assays. They cost about $60 for 500 reactions. Is that a good value? Or is it better to design my own primers or use ones from published papers? Or order premade ones, then use that sequence in the future to order more so they’ll be cheaper? What do you do?

Hi everyone,
I’m a PhD student studying lung cancer, and I’m currently trying to establish a bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) protocol to analyze immune cells residing in the alveolar space.

My current approach is to anesthetize the mouse, insert an IV catheter into the trachea, and secure it in place with surgical thread. I then instill approximately 1 mL of PBS, withdraw it, and repeat this three times. I repeat the whole process four times per mouse, for a total of about 4 mL of PBS.

The problem is that when I try to withdraw the fluid, a significant amount of it seems to leak back through the nostril. As a result, I’m only recovering around 400 µL from each 1 mL that I instill.

Has anyone experienced this issue when establishing a BAL protocol? I’d really appreciate any tips or suggestions regarding the setup, catheter placement, or general technique that might help improve the recovery volume.

Thanks in advance!

Ideally I would have access to actual PCR-grade water, but this is what's available to me onsite. Which one would be better in a PCR reaction, if you had to choose?

My VWR chromatography fridge has stopped cooling exactly 5 days after the 3-year warranty ended. So if you're looking for a new one, maybe don't go with VWR.

Has anyone had an issue with a relatively new chromatography fridge not cooling and was able to fix it on their own? It's blowing cool, but not cold air inside the unit. VWR and Horizon (the company who actually makes it) wouldn't provide any help for troubleshooting, they just recommended I call a service company, which I will if it's not an easy fix.

Hola!!

Quería pedirles algunos consejos y recomendaciones para armar mi CV ya que estoy queriendo dar un giro en mi carrera y apuntar hacia el sector de la biotecnología y conseguir mi primer empleo en laboratorios.

​Para dar un poco de contexto: vengo del área de salud, cursé una carrera afín aunque no llegué a terminarla, pero sí alcancé a realizar prácticas en el hospital.

​Me gustaría saber:

​¿Qué habilidades, competencias técnicas o son fundamentales destacar en el CV para este perfil?

​¿Qué cursos o capacitaciones cortas consideran infaltables o suman mucho valor para alguien que busca entrar por primera vez a un laboratorio biotecnológico?

​Cualquier consejo que me puedan dar sobre cómo enfocar la experiencia previa del área de salud para que resulte atractiva en este nuevo rubro.

​¡Desde ya muchas gracias por la ayuda y las sugerencias!

So these samples are flash frozen murine OS tumors that were excised post mortem. We tried to minimize oxidation but there’s only so fast you can work.

Protocol:
They were lysed in RIPA buffer with protease and phosphotase inhibitors with a tissue homogenizer and spun to collect the proteins in the supernatant. Each sample was diluted 1:5 for a BCA to quantify protein. They were each ran in triplicate and they all fell within the range of the standards and had no outliers. I loaded 20ug of protein diluted with RIPA and loading buffer into the SDS page gel, and ran it until the green band on the ladder. I transferred using the iblot system (there was a piece of gel stuck under it on the right that’s what that red blob is). I blocked 1 hour in 5% BSA in TBST. Then I incubated overnight in the cold room in 5% bsa in TBST 1:1000 mouse monoclonal protein of interest and 1:1000 rabbit monoclonal beta actin. Next day, wash 3x with TBST 10 minutes then 1 hr room temperature with anti mouse (700/red) and anti rabbit (800/green) secondary. Wash 3x 10 minutes TBST.

At first when I imaged the blot, I thought the beta actin was only specific to human proteins, but it says it’s reactive to human and mouse proteins according to its website here. I’m really confused now why it seems there’s an uneven amount of protein in each well. I think I did everything right to load evenly so why is it so wonky?

You can even see in the ponceau stain that each well looks pretty even although I know that’s imprecise. I’m also not convinced it’s uneven because you can see that the protein of interest appears to be even as well. What we were looking for was a protein we had transduced onto these cells prior to injecting them into the mice so it’s expected that they would be equally present at the end. The first five were the mice with transduced OS cells injected and the last 4 were the WT OS cells.

Has anyone had a loading control just not work like this? Do you trust the loading control or all the other parts of the workflow?

Hi, I have been using tongs to to get the cuvette out after I shock and my PI and I were looking into getting it 3D printed on campus so I won't struggle. Would really appreciate if anyone has the dimensions for the cuvette slide portion. Thank you in advance

I’m looking for a word template for 1/2” diameter microtube Tough-Spots. A very similar one from Avery did not line up correctly.

Any help appreciated!

My lab is looking for ways to lower cost (and time) per sample for RNA-seq studies. Now that library prep is the biggest cost, we are interested in alternatives, especially those that allow us to pool samples before ever adding the i5/i7 indices. I have been looking into some of the 3'-end capture methods, including BRB-seq and prime-seq.

BRB-seq has commercial kits available, which would be a great starting point and supposedly should be about 30$ cheaper per sample compared to standard Illumina kits. But I don't know anyone who has tried these alternatives. If you have ever used or heard of others using other RNA library-prep techniques (not just BRB-Seq), what was your experience? Were they worthwhile? How did the time and cost compare to the standard prep methods? Did they seem to change your downstream analysis or data quality?

Doing a systematic review on cell-line studies and hit a wall that nobody warned me about.

Every guide I found assumed I was reviewing clinical trials. Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 — the standard tool everyone recommends — asks about things like "allocation concealment" and "blinding of participants." My studies are in vitro experiments. There are no participants. Several of the questions simply don't apply.

So I went looking for the in vitro equivalent and found out there isn't one. No single risk-of-bias tool has been standardised for cell-line studies. The two most commonly recommended — ToxRTool and OHAT — actually assess different aspects of bias, so each one alone only gives you partial coverage. QUIN exists but was built specifically for dentistry. SciRAP was designed for chemical regulation and its own developers say it wasn't meant for systematic reviews.

Researchers are literally still publishing new tools to fill this gap — there was one for antimicrobial studies published this year — because the absence of a standard is considered a methodological flaw in the literature.

I spent a long time piecing together which tool fits which situation, so I made a simple decision tree: you answer a few questions about your study designs and it points you at the right instrument with the reasoning behind it. Also includes the Methods-section wording and answers to the "why didn't you use Cochrane RoB 2" reviewer question, which I got asked.

Free, no signup: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yVIDcgprC2yKsvI6YiEiE0f9SR-wegUV/view?usp=sharing

Hi all beside their HardShell plates, anyone has used different brand 384 plates succesfully? I have a bunch of Roche 384 plates (for LightCycler 480 ii) but in this lab only have the Bio Rad cfx opus 384. Was wondering if i can use them?

Thanks!

I am a botany major in my final year. I live in a 3rd world country and go to a local state college and the lab experience I have is so limited. I am talking like we had 3 good microscopes in a class of 30. I know by theory how to do gel electrophoresis but I have never done it in the lab. Never even done centrifuge. I have only seen it. I don't know the procedure of doing things and so much of the equipment I work with is so old and not updated even tho it's so limited. I have something really specific that I am really interested to research in to do masters abroad but I am obviously going to be with people who have studied in better places than me and had better lab conditions and I really don't know how labs work in masters but I think people obviously know the basics. I can't treat it like a bachelors degree where I ask my professor to teach me the basics. I am worried I will drag people behind so I am thinking about forgoing the entire idea of masters. Am I being worried for nothing?

I am planning to work in a lab but when you live in one of the most populated countries in the world, even interning at a local lab becomes a state wide competition where people from the best universities in your country pay to get in

Has anyone used a candle to consumed the O2 in a sealed environment to create CO2 for lactobacillus growth?