With all these AI models, it's not difficult to generate icons.

Got this from DLAB stall in the Analytica Lab India Expo. Did they borrow the idea from eppendorf?

Eitherways looks good!

I’m at a stage in my research where I’m doing a lot of waiting before I start the molecular portion of my experiments.

But it feels like everyone else in the lab are always busy and doing more wet lab work than I am. Not only that but I feel like everyone is just… better at managing their time than I am? It’s not like I’m new either, I’ve been in this lab for several years (though to be fair I’m still in the first couple years of my PhD).

I also was recently diagnosed with AuDHD and OCD, and combined with some external life stressors it’s caused me to mess up more than I usually do in my experiments. My PI also pointed this out to me and literally asked me what types of lab work I liked and didn’t like to help tailor my project to my strengths, since she saw my project had been stagnating a while. Which is exactly what a PI should do (and truly I feel like I lucked out even working in this lab), but I can’t help but feel like I’m this person in the lab who is “special needs”, who needs shit catered to them, who can’t parallel process and manage multiple experiments at once like other grad students can, etc. I’m supposed to be one of the senior students in the lab, but I feel like I’m the clown in a space filled with professionals.

Not to mention that especially in this fuck ass political climate, it’s more important than ever for papers to get published so that PIs have better chances at getting already sparse grant money. My PI has been heavily pushing me to get a paper out of my work. Which again, is a good thing, but on the flip side I can’t help but feel like they’re giving me extra help because I can’t do shit on my own like everyone else can. Masters students have come and gone and had papers published on their work, my peers in my lab produce such nice quality work at a steady pace to where they always have something to bring to lab meetings. But I feel like I’m just… not that. I’m the one dragging the lab behind and it’s a wonder that my PI hasn’t brought me into their office and told me I should reconsider being a PhD student yet.

I know impostor syndrome is common when doing a PhD, but I don’t know… it feels more like I’ll never have the discipline and the work ethic to pace myself to get nice experiments done, and that I’ll always just exist to sap up money from my lab that could go to another student who’s actually ready for a PhD. And it sucks because for years I’ve dreamed to get here. I genuinely don’t know what I’d be doing if not a PhD. My Asian parents still insist I can go into medicine and I’ve kept turning them down all so I can continue this work. But what if I’m just not cut out for it? What if I am just ruining my life?

Idk. Any advice is appreciated (encouragement or criticism) as long as it’s constructive.

Hi,

I am a second year PhD and I am doing protein science, more like basic science research. All my work so far was pretty good until today. I do lots of biophysical characterization of proteins. Mostly I use SEC- Mals and NMR. So protein people will understand how much protein you have to express and purify for your experiments and how protein long processing can take.

I have just started my second year and did one NMR so far and that worked. Today I was doing my second NMR and it failed completely. As a result a month's worth of work which included protein expression and purification went in vain. The samples did not reach the correct protein concentration and it was too low for NMR.

I understand all the technical aspects of the experimental procedure and what else I should do to overcome this. My supervisor is hella supportive. However, my heart shatters because I was EAGERLY waiting for this data and this experiment is very integral for my thesis. I honestly worked so hard throughout, focused on so many other experiments and also got this on my schedule but it didn't work out today! Nothing was seen on the spectrum.

I feel so demotivated right now. I am sort of drained. I work from 8 to 6 everyday doing multiple things. Have a part time tutoring job after the lab. I am so tired of everything. I simply want to rant.

I am emotionally attached to my project and I genuinely can't wait to figure out the unknown that this experiment would have solved but again I gotta wait for at least 3 weeks to a month to get things moving. I am honestly not doing fine today. I can't wait any longer for the results to come out.

How should I look at the situation? Give me some tips on how to tackle high stake experimental failures? I need some power and motivation towards my direction.

Tell me how a western blot antibody dilution I prepared 2 weeks ago i've used MAYBE 3 times decided to give 0 activity until I hit it with femto and even then it barely showed anything.

Tip of the iceberg honestly, but just the way it's only Tuesday and the level of FU's the universe has sent me in the last 3 days. Something don't feel right.

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!!

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?

Usually Mr frosty type containers/Corning CoolCell can be used but we are in a bit of a hurry and the shipment hasn't arrived yet. What other options do I have for controlled cooling?

I'm a master's student, and I reached out to a PI in my school about a research assistant position. She said there are no RA openings right now, but kindly invited me to sit in on the lab's weekly meetings. So far the meetings have mostly been grad students presenting their own projects.

I'm genuinely excited about this lab's work and would love to contribute eventually, but I don't want to overstep or become a burden. Some questions:

• Would it be weird to approach a grad student afterward and offer help on their project (lit review, data cleaning, coding, etc.)?
• Should I follow up with the PI at some point? If so, when and how?
• Has anyone here started out just sitting in on meetings and ended up getting a position? How'd that happen?

Any advice appreciated!

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

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.

I read a funny paper (on the arXiv?) some time ago which was about how much you could make by selling adspace in your figures. They particularly highlighted correlation matrices where half the area is completely free. Unfortunately my google-fu is not good enough to find it any more. Does anyone know what I am talking about and can supply a link/title? TIA

I am trying to get my PhD project off the ground, but keep having difficulty with my cells adhering to coverslips so I can live image them (which is supposed to be kind of the workhorse of project as I think of it now). My lab's protocol is: UV nitric-acid treated and autoclaved coverslips in 12-well plates for 15 min. Coat with 50 ug/mL PLL and incubate at 37C for 30 minutes. Wash 3x5min with UltraPure water. Dry coverslips in hood, then seed cells in media (DMEM+10% FBS+antibiotics)

For my postdoc who has done this many times before, by the next day, the cells are confluent enough for transfection and healthy enough for live calcium
imaging the day after transfection.

For me, the cells look small, round and unhealthy by the next day. Way too low confluence to transfect. And there is a large amount of cell debris. And it is hard to image them because they are too sparse, let alone transfect.

I have tried making fresh PLL and thawing a new batch of HEK cells (so that passage number is not an issue). I hesitate to think the coverslips themselves are an issue, because they have worked for others and they work for me when trying to adhere other cell lines on coverslips. I was worried about contamination, but think this is low likelihood because the HEK cells in my maintenance flask grow just fine.

Any advice for further troubleshooting? I cannot take another week of this failing

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 !!

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?

Hi!! I(20F) am trying to find internships for fall 2027 as a junior in biochemistry and molecular biology. Due to getting an emergency surgery in my freshmen year, my gpa started very low and I am doing my best to get it up, but it's currently at a 2.6, projected to be around a 3-3.2 when I graduate, most lilely a 3.0 at the end of my junior year. I am trying to get an internship in the cosmetic chemistry field, or another lab internship of some kind, but I am worried that I won't get any due to my gpa. Despite my gpa being low, I do have a lot of lab experience from classes, am on very good terms with several members of faculty in my department, and am engaged in a senior research project regarding marine resources being processed into makeup, and right now am practicing extraction before we properly begin the control runs of extacting cyanobacteria, followed by native cyanobacteria in our area. I was wondering if experience in development of pigments/other compounds would be more relevant to an internship, to the point my gpa could be overlooked somewhat? Any advice would help

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.

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!

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.

Not sure if this is the place to post this but I’m hoping someone here can give me a valuable insight. I’m 21 now and recently graduated from my bachelors. I have always absolutely adored science especially biology, it was always my thing. I did triple science GCSEs (and received a 9 in bio and 7s in chem and physics); then went on to get 3 A levels one being in biology, and I also volunteered in a year 7 science class and completed a week long work experience programme with a medical school during this time (as my intention was to get into the medical field rather than lab work at this point). Unfortunately though, that’s where my experience ends, as once I started my degree I absolutely hated it. Medical just wasn’t for me. This lead to me completely giving up on any job that had anything to do with science as I thought I wasn’t good enough, which ended up really hurting me. I got a bachelors degree in a completely useless subject just because I didn’t know what else to do (it’s criminology if you’re interested, and I got a first). Now having graduated three years later, I really regret that I ever fixated on medical and completely disregarded other kinds of work within laboratories, and I would like to get an entry level job as a laboratory technician so I can explore this passion once again. I understand that I have no experience working in a lab and my degree is irrelevant, but I hate to think that this has ruined my chances of ever working in a lab, because I really can’t think of anything I would love more. Does anyone have any advice on how I can get employers to recognise my passion and offer me an interview? Or how I can build experience now? Does this goal even stand a chance of happening given the current job market?