In the Lab
evolgen | November 8, 2007Chad asked a fun question last week, and I just got around to finding it yesterday:
What items should be on the list for a scavenger hunt through an academic physics department?
Let's now ask: what items should be on a list for a scavenger hunt through a biology department? Taking some hints from Chad and his commenters, here are my ideas to prime the pump:
A reagent bottle with a label dating it to the 1980s
An out of use fume hood above "the line"
A paper copy of a PLoS Journal (they exist)
A non-top-heated thermal cycler
A Project Steve Steve
A journal article used to prop up something
A…
evolgen | August 12, 2007
Wow, posts at evolgen have been few and far between. A damn, dirty manuscript is to blame. I keep trying to get it write itself, but the sucker refused to oblige. Maybe it would help if I could finish the data analysis.
But enough about me. Let's talk about me Steve Steve. The last time Professor Steve made an appearance on evolgen we were on our way back from the Fly Meeting (the other Fly Meeting posts can be found here: 1, 2, 3). After we got home, Steve Steve visited our lab, and I got a few pictures of him posing with Charles Darwin and hanging out in the fly room. You can see them all…
evolgen | May 31, 2007Late last week, my PCRs stopped working. One day I was able to amplify DNA from multiple different templates using different primers, and the next day I couldn't. This is a major setback for me -- a huge chunk of the remaining work I need to complete for my PhD involves doing PCR. If I can't get my PCRs to work, I'm royally screwed.
As soon as I couldn't get any PCR products, I went into troubleshooting mode. I had just made a new batch of dNTPs, so those were the first thing to get replaced. No dice. I thought there might be something wrong with my water, so I grabbed a new bottle and made…
evolgen | May 10, 2007Nothing captures life in the academic sciences quite like Piled Higher and Deeper. In yesterday's comic, Jorge Cham shows us the disgusting innards of the lab/office fridge. Now, Jorge is a physicist engineer, so his fridge is the one where you're supposed to store your food and drinks. When a biologist thinks of a lab fridge, he pictures something quite different. With that in mind, here's my rendition of "The Lab Fridge":
Aside from the empty bottles that some lazy, inconsiderate lab mate (most likely me) failed to refill, what's missing from the fridge?
evolgen | April 19, 2007On yesterday's episode of Mythbusters they tested the myth that birds in a trailer decrease the weight of the trailer when the birds take flight. The 'busters put a bunch of birds into a trailer, weighed the trailer + birds, and then allowed the birds to fly in the trailer, measuring the weight every fraction of a second. The myth was rejected because, while the weight fluctuated a fair bit, the mean weight remained the same before and after the birds took flight.
When a bird (or anything else that flies) gets airborne, it must exert a downward force equal to its weight. The weight of the…
evolgen | March 6, 2007Alex claims I do cowboy science because my protocol for DNA isolation requires cutting plastic with hot razor blades. But before we ever get to cut any plastic, we need to grind up the flies. I don't have any pretty pictures of this process, but I can capture the essence in words (picture may come later). It starts with "homogenizing" about two grams of flies in a few milliliters of buffer. We end up with a Drosophila shake -- kind of like a milk shake, only without milk and you probably don't want to drink it -- which has a bunch of particulate matter (pieces of exoskeleton, wings, legs,…
evolgen | January 18, 2007Allow me to set the stage. I just emerged from the autoclave room with a cart full of hot, steamy, dirty vials and bottles of Drosophila media in tow (see image below the fold). The glassware had been the home for thousands of flies for a period of over a month. What started out as a mixture of agar, cornmeal, yeast, molasses was churned up and excreted into by tons of larvae. All this nastiness was then heated at high pressure, releasing all kinds of aromas that I have the pleasure of dragging around our building. I'm a real popular guy.
I had to push the cart from the autoclave room to the…
evolgen | December 31, 2006Biologists often wear rubber gloves when doing their research to protect them from the nasty chemicals they're working with and to protect their samples from contamination. I've been known to bitch about people not removing those gloves prior to entering common areas -- touching things they shouldn't be touching with gloves. This could lead to mutagens, carcinogens, and simply abrasive reagents on doorknobs and elevator buttons that other people touch with their bare hands. Or it could lead to environmental particles on the gloves which could contaminate and ruin some experiment. The chances…
evolgen | December 4, 2006The funniest lab accident?
There was the time I spent an entire day trying to make electrophoretic gels using distilled water instead of buffer. The agarose suspended fine in the distilled water, but I couldn't get it to solidify. I kept remaking the agarose solution and never got anything worthwhile. The next day, I asked a lab mate what I was doing wrong. I found out and felt damn stupid.
And just last week the autoclave leaked. A brown liquid covered the floor. It was real funny while I cleaned it up.
Or how about the time I mouth pipetted ethyl methanesulfonate . . . NOT!!
evolgen | November 22, 2006I've got another pet-peeve-itch to scratch, so I'm picking up a tall glass of haterade.
I'm walking down the stairwell in my building, and I encounter someone heading upstairs carrying a styrofoam container (I can't tell what's in it, but it's probably filled with ice and something worth keeping cold). We approach the door to the floor we both work on. She gets there first and extends her hand to open the door -- a hand ensconced in a rubber glove.
When doing lab work, we wear gloves for two reasons:
To protect our samples from contamination from ourselves.
To protect ourselves from…
evolgen | September 19, 2006So I'm back doing lab work again. That means I'm stumbling across weird stuff that Dylan might get a kick out of. Before I could start isolating any DNA, I had to make sure all my reagents and buffer solutions were ready to go. I was digging through our chemicals cabinet when I found this buffer:
In case you can't read the label (the camera wouldn't focus on the text) it says "Buffer". For those of you not in the know, that isn't very informative. The rest of the label doesn't provide much more information. It tells you into which solvent it should be dissolved and store at room temperature…
evolgen | September 18, 2006After spending the last couple of years in front of a computer or in the fly room, I finally returned to the wet lab last week. The occasion: DNA isolation. Now, this isn't any ole' DNA isolation protocol. That would be too easy. Instead, I need some high molecular weight DNA, which means it takes a few days from start to finish with lots of centrifugation throughout.
Because I need lots of high quality DNA, I need a fair bit of tissue. This wouldn't be much of a problem if I were working with an organism with a substantial body mass. Alas, I work with Drosophila, and they're tiny. That means…