Annual PM today. I’m the only one in our lab who runs it so it feels nice to know my labor is appreciated by someone other than me 😂😭

Sent my MSc research proposal to my PI yesterday.

This morning he sent me SMS says “Hi… please call me”.

Not knowing what have I done wrong, I panicked and thought maybe he thinks i used too much AI or something. Decided not to call him and to meet him face to face in the lab, maybe seeing my face would make him less aggressive..

He wasn’t there.

I called him, and he said “Hi, I can’t manage to open the word document, could you send me a PDF?”.

God, felt so stupid for panicking.

He never yelled at me or anything.

TW : fungus

Fun fact : Since all my experiences (I’m in the end of my first year of PhD) in cell culture, I’ve never had a contamination.

These are VERO E6

2 weeks ago I got some days off and so my PI told me she could do my culture during my absence. It was not the first time I ask someone to do my culture when I’m not in the lab but it was the first time my PI did it for me.

She just did one passage on Thursday 2 weeks ago

Last week when I came back on Monday, I saw that my cells weren’t well : they were supposed to be 90-100% confluent as an intact monolayer but here they were having some holes … I still passage them and even used them for infection and they weren’t good at all…

Because of that I decided to continue my culture using not these cells but a previous passage that I kept in back-up. Even with that the cells were doing holes…

Anyway I kept the flask of my PI as a back up flask at 1/20.

One week later (today) I discovered fungus in my flask. But only in this one, not the others…

EDIT : and yes I got antibiotics-antimycotic solution in my medium

When is it time to throw in the towel and declare a paper unpublishable? Asking for a friend…

i will start......in my lab the PI gave every one of us our own pair of crocs and they never left the lab. you come in, keep your outside shoes in the shoe rack at the entrance and change into your lab crocs, so shoes never needed any cleaning.

i was working with cell lines there and the cell culture was in a separate compartment inside the lab, so we also wore aprons and sanitised a lot before entering that part.

curious to know how different it is in other places

i feel like she can…

I submitted a manuscript to a Nature Portfolio journal, and this is its latest status. Does this suggest a possible rejection, or is there still a chance it could lead to a major or minor revision?

Hello everyone,

I started my first job as a lab technician in July, after completing my Master’s in Medical Biology, and I could really use some advice.

Last week, I performed my first experiment independently after completing my training, and it went terribly wrong. It’s a complex, three-week-long protocol with hundreds of steps, and somewhere along the way, several things went wrong.

The frustrating part is that I performed the same experiment last month with another lab technician, and it worked perfectly. This was supposed to be a replicate, so I know the protocol and reagents work.

I’m really disappointed because I was extremely careful and genuinely thought everything was going well. I also completed another, much simpler experiment successfully, but this failure has made me question whether I’m good enough for the job.

My senior lab technician also seems very disappointed, which makes the situation even harder.
I know I’ve only been doing this for four months, but I’m scared of making more mistakes and eventually losing my job.

Has anyone experienced something similar when starting out in the lab? How did you overcome it? I could really use some perspective and reassurance that this doesn’t mean I’m not cut out for research.

hello labrats!

I'm a Master's student. Because of a lot of politics that have been going on in my research project, we could not get as much work done as we wanted to, and honestly we are all super confused about the project.

The environment here is extremely toxic as well. Constantly being told we are pathetic, we have no skills, we are dumb etc. in front of other faculty and students, being laughed at and mocked by professors etc. We have already borne a lot of public humiliation up till now. Some of it is our fault but definitely not all of it. We are not such horrible students. We are respectful. We are trying our best with the situation we have been dealt.

In a nutshell, our project involves both computer and experimental work. It has been going on for 3 months now. It was supposed to go on till December but for some reason they suddenly decided to end it early. We were only able to culture the cell lines and maintain them, and we couldn't actually do experiments with them. As for the computer work, we were only able to do some molecular docking. Even those results we aren't able to understand because every time we tried to approach our guide for help we were yelled at or mocked or dismissed.

Tomorrow is our final presentation, and I'm really scared. Mark my words, we are going to be humiliated and trashed like we are the worst people in the world, in front of everyone. My supervisor thinks we don't attend because she was told that. We do attend. We just didn't attend in the early days because we were doing lit review, but since then we've been coming regularly for months. One of our guides told our supervisor lies, that we've not been attending, so she hates us now.

I have SH issues. I feel like I'm gonna get super triggered after the presentation. I am already getting triggered by it. I need advice, please tell me how to cope with this, because humiliation is guaranteed.

Bit of a rant, will keep it not very specific so as to avoid doxxing myself. I’m a PhD student in STEM, and get along very well with everyone in my group except for this one person who joined a few months ago. We don’t work together exactly, but we do work on very similar projects so we share reagents, space, equipment etc.

To be quite blunt, this person makes my life harder in a lot of ways. I find them sloppy, not cleaning up messes, forgetting to do shared lab tasks, reorder reagents etc. I do mention these things to them whenever it happens, but it seems to keep happening regardless. I do get the sense they don’t really take me seriously because I’m female and significantly younger but that’s speculation on my part.

They’re not a bad person or anything, although they have made a few comments I didn’t really like. But our work styles really don’t gel and I don’t like being around them. Obviously I try to stay out of their way as much as I can, but there’s only so much I can do that. They’ve also asked me before if they offended me in some way and I said no, I’m just stressed with work. But the truth is I just really don’t want to be their friend or talk to them outside of what’s required. I’m perfectly civil when talking about work related stuff IMO. But I do worry that, since I’m more friendly with the others in my group, this will be seen as me being hostile towards this one person by my PI or whoever.

So just wondering how other people have handled similar situations 😬 I know there will always be people at work that you don’t get along with, but I’m just not great with interpersonal stuff.

I’m a first-year PhD student in immunology (wet lab, not computational), and I’m trying to figure out my next rotation and, eventually, my thesis lab.

Option 1: A brand-new lab. The PI just started, but he trained at the same institute, so he already knows his way around the university and has connections here. I’d be his first PhD student. I genuinely love the research.

Option 2: An established lab. It has a track record, senior students, but I’m less interested in the research.

My main worry is time to degree. I really want to graduate in five years, and I’m scared that joining a new lab will slow me down with setup, mouse colonies, approvals, and no senior lab members to learn from. At the same time, I know five years is a long time to spend on research I’m only lukewarm about.

For those who joined a new lab as the first student, or chose between options like these:

• Did being first in a new lab delay your graduation?
• What red or green flags should I look for during the rotation?
• What should I ask the PI before committing?
• Did anyone pick the “safer” lab and regret it, or pick passion and regret it?

Any advice is appreciated!

Hello! I’ve had a very intense journey with mouse work and wanted to share a little bit of my experience to maybe help some people.

For context, I’m in my last year of my undergrad and have been doing research for a year and a half, but have only recently (past 3 months) switched to more direct in vivo work instead of just working with tissue generated by senior members.

I was very unsure about animal work going into it, but wanted to at least try before I cut it off completely as an option. My PI has been very supportive and has made it known that there is no expectation to be directly involved in animal work if I don’t want to.

My first training course handling the mice went nearly as bad as it could. They freaked me out so bad - I wasn’t expecting them to be so wiggly or so strong. Then I got bit while trying to scruff them which kickstarted a panic attack (which obviously the mice sensed and made everything worse). I barely passed with the caveat that I practice LOTS and with supervision until I’m fully comfortable with them.

That scared me off for a month or so, but again I wanted to see if I could overcome my fears. I scheduled more practice with some spare mice that weren’t being used, and the first time handling them nearly had another panic attack. Getting even nibbled on really kickstarted my fight or flight no matter how hard I tried to be calm. But I kept practicing nearly every day! And eventually was able to pick them up and restrain pretty comfortably. I then passed my IP injection training with flying colours.

Now it’s been about two months, and I’ve improved a lot and am now able to swiftly and surely handle and restrain the mice with little stress, and noticed today that my colony has become very comfortable and trusting to my handling, which to me is a huge success. I also greatly enjoy the work now too, and have so much respect and gratitude to the little guys.

It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to put my mind to, and I’m so proud of myself! I really feel like anything is possible now.

Mine is a cheap 4-channel timer! Without it half my incubations would be overcooked.

Does anyone have experience with the new-ish NEB Q5-XT polymerase?

I do a lot of longer amplicon PCR (∼10kb) for cloning and genomic integration casettes and generally my go-to has been SuperFi II but always looking for better and cheaper alternatives. I have used regular Q5 and have found in general I get lower yields, particularly for larger amplicons, and it takes significantly longer.

Hi everyone,

I think I may have accidentally damaged our PromethION 2 Solo with a static discharge.

I was sequencing two ultra-long DNA libraries when I touched the instrument, possibly causing an electrostatic discharge. Immediately afterward, the device started flashing green, both sequencing positions appeared to reset, and MinKNOW reported "Error receiving data from the device" on both positions simultaneously.

Although both runs remained active, the number of sequencing channels dropped dramatically (from 2000 to around 50). The instrument never fully powered off, but the issue hasn't resolved.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Could a static discharge really cause permanent hardware damage?

Any advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated. We've spent quite a bit of time preparing these libraries, so this has been pretty frustrating.

and my failed y2h

Folks, I do not know if I came to the right place to ask this question.

TLDR; how to most thoroughly clean porous surfaces like upholstery and fabrics from medication particles?

———
Context:

I have a health condition that makes me outrageously sensitive to certain medications, to the point that I get a full dose of a medication from a simple sniff.

I have a medication called aripiprazole that marinated in my living area for several hours and contaminated all sorts of porous materials like bags and cardboard and blankets, etc.

I need to get the active ingredient out in any way possible. We can filter it, we can neutralize it, whatever.

What do I do? Is there a professional setup for this kind of problem?

I tried running regular air purifiers with HEPA + carbon filter for days, but shouldn’t there be a professional machine that vacuums for long period of time to get particles and gases out of fabric pores?

Something I've been dealing with recently that I'd like some insight on:

My lab has recently bought an autoclave and before I took over, we had bought many fume hoods. We own these entirely and the vendors for both are withholding the admin credentials. I could possibly force the issue, but haven't as on a day to day it isn't an issue.

I'm not interested in why, I'm just interested in what the hell is going on? How is this any different than buying a car and having the keys kept from you?

Hi everyone! I've been having some problems with my cells being contaminated, so I wanted to check whether my media (DMEM/F12 + GlutaMAX) could be a source of contamination. I put 2 mL of media in each well of a 6-well plate and put it in the incubator. Two days later, I checked, and this is what I saw. I'm not sure what this implies about my media, since there are no cells or any organic material in the wells.

Hi all,

When I have long experiments to run I like to listen to videos or podcasts on my headphones (I'm sure I'm not the only one !). One issue I got myself into is that I find that most of the podcasts out there are just... kinda boring ? They are aimed at a large audience so will usually stay on the surface level and are not that intellectually stimulating. Take for example the ologies podcast : you have experts in their respective fields but the host only asks basic questions and doesn't let them actually say anything of depth, kind of frustrating.

I'm looking for stuff that delves deep and that doesn't take its audience for dummies ! I want to hear experts yap about their interest for hours, stuff like that. I've found that a couple of the Big Think interviews were good, I also like the style of Tor's cabinet, which is really well researched.

Let me know you favourites !

Hello, I have extracted RNA from the hippocampus and I need to run cDNA synthesis(iSCRIPT BioRad) and qPCR(iTaq universal Sybr green). I have 12 samples and 4 genes including housekeeping gene. I have 2 questions:
1) how much RNA should I add to do the cDNA synthesis?
2) how much cDNA and primers should I add for the qPCR step?
I’m trying it for the first time and no one in my lab knows how to do it. Also, if there are any tips/ suggestions I should do, pls lmk!
Thank you so much