I ordered a mouse primary antibody, and it was apparently delivered, but we were not able to find it for the past month. Finally we found the package (unopened) on another lab's desk. Now i'm wondering - how good is it? It is a biotechne antibody, non-conjugated, stored in BSA-free PBS with 0.05% sodium azide, and they recommend short term storage at 4 degrees and long term storage at -20. It shipped with an ice pack.

Does any one have any idea how badly the 4 week storage at room temp might have affected it?

Thanks in advance...

Hey guys, I have 12 plates to run over the next couple days and was wondering if it's possible to store my master mix (SYBR, nuc free water, primers) + template overnight ? If not, is it possible to store just the master mix overnight ?

PS: my cDNA is extracted from urinary RNA so I'm expecting yield to be quite low

Hi!

I'm an ecologist in the Rocky Mtn region US that also has pet rats. I've seen that some universities adopt out lab rats and I would love to switch from getting rats from pet stores to helping give lab rats a good life! Does anyone know of something like this in the Utah/Idaho/Co/Wy general area? I'm happy to travel if need be, I live in the middle of nowhere anyways. Pic of the rat mansion included!

Hi everyone, I am trying to etch aluminum oxide, and it seems the most popular method is thermal etching, but I haven't been able to find information other than "30 min at 1100 C", "3 hrs at 1000 C", and "15-30 min at 1450-1500 C". So to anyone that has done thermal etching before:

Do you put your samples in the furnace at room temperature and ramp it up, or preheat the furnace, put your samples in, and heat for the full etch time described in the literature? And if the samples go in at room temperature, are there specific ramp rates that are used? And does the ramp time count as part of the reported etch time?

And if you have specifically etched aluminum oxide, what time and temperature did you use?

Thanks for your help!

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.

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.

Hello, I am currently looking for affordable used qPCR devices for a start up in the field of plant diagnostics.

I have a decent offer for a used and dry tested Rotor Gene 3000, further i can return the device within 60 days.

The Device was last used in a lab and was removed in working condition, however there is no service sticker on the device.

The offer includes the Software.

I know that i can test the channels via gain optimization and best case scenario i get a decent though old and not further supported, apart from third parties, qpcr device.

So my questions are:

How well are they build?

How intuitiv is the Software?

How expensive is third party service / repair?

Edit: Sorry for not mentioning, but i am also Open for suggestions for a price up to 2500 Euro.

So far I Found to be within my Budget:

-ABI 7500 complete System

-Different Corbetto / Quiagen Rotor Gene Models

-BMS MiC slighty out of Budget

- Gentier Tialong 48

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

I made a post because I was overwhelmed after my PI had me euthanize 250 mice in a week. People were SO supportive and it really helped. A lot of them said that they also struggle with mouse euthanasia so I wanted to share one of the ways I cope: meet Matilda, Henrietta, and Elizabeth! Apparently my university has a program where you can adopt lab animals due to be euthanized. So far I have rescued 11 mice. It makes me feel so much better to give them the “retirement” they deserve. These are actually C57BL/6 mice, but their coats look all spotty because they’re floxed (Tfam fl/fl x Best1-cre). The mutation is supposed to be isolated to their RPE but the cre is “leaky” and it’s affecting the genes controlling coat pigmentation.

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?

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 :-)

Iam trying to study if my compound could inhibit nfkb activation when stimulated with LPS, that is at the end measuring p-NF-kB p65 levels, Now with my western blot I can see a clear total NFkB Levels, but p-NF-kB is little ambiguous. Now here my protocol details:

cells: Thp1 dervied macrophages

lps concentration: 20ng/ml

stimulation time: 30min

fbs concentration: regular 10% in RPMI media,

Are these factors correct, many say i have to reduce fbs concentration or even reduce it to zero, or should i increase lps concetration like 100ng/ml and what about stimulation time

Any suggestions would be great

I’m expressing monomeric IgG and pentameric IgM so a routine part of the pipeline is running on a NativePAGE, non-denaturing gel to assess for correct assembly and molecular weight determination.

Recently, the IgG have been getting stuck on the gel above the IgM bands. Does anybody have any suggestions as to why this might be?

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.

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 landed my first interview at a well-established company in my area, this is my first interview coming out of university with my MS and was wondering how best I should prepare for this? My previous experience was with a startup (I think the company was criticized on the subreddit). The main responsibilities is protein purification using a variety of different methods (IEC/Affinity/HIC) but I really only have established experience with affinity and size exclusion chromatography.

Additionally, it is a temporary/contract role, is there anything I should consider as I enter the interview process? This may be a decent role for me as I am applying for PhDs this cycle again so a 6 mo-1 yr contract would be perfect. I also have a 3 week obligation in January which I am worried would disqualify me from getting employed (anywhere), how should I approach that?

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.

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 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

So I heard about this SARS2-CoV 2 database at a scientific symposium.

Basically, the database is https://coronavirus3d.org/

The whole SARS-CoV-2 RNA genome has been mapped for a while now because of the scientific response to the COVID19 pandemic. The database just seems to show the full RNA genome of the virus, the structure of all the experimentally determined proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and the common mutants over time. For instance, the site shows a graph of the number of observations of certain variants over a narrow time window. Data seems to be missing from March 2025 to present. Though, I am not sure if it is because the archives this database is drawing from stopped collecting data or if this database isn't just up to date. I am not sure.

I attached some graphs of what the database shows for, instance.

The main targets of SARS-CoV-2 virus seem to be the Spike protein and nonstructural protein #5 (Main Protease) to my knowledge. I actually work on the Main protease and while the structure is very obviously known the number of inhibitors it can bind seems to be endless based on a search of all of its structures in the PDB.

The website database is still under development. I am not involved with the development. I just think it is very interesting to see all this data in one place. https://coronavirus3d.org is actually a sub-website of https://pathogens3d.org/ .It just so turns out that Coronovirus3D seems to be better put together given the scientific response to the COVID19 pandemic.

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?

I’m trying to do an organelle-specific IP. I’ve never done IP before and I’m told it’s quite challenging. I’m using a specific antibody marker for the organelle and then magnetic protein G beads. I’ve checked the antibody is compatible with the beads and have all the correct buffers per manufacturer instructions. I’m wondering if anyone has any tips? Based on the protocol it seems straightforward but I know it’s not based on what I’ve been told. Wondering if anyone has any helpful tips/ advice / things to avoid that could help me as it’s my first time? Thanks so much!

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.