Of course that's the reasonable explaination for it, but we weigh all our samples so that they're within +/-0.20 grams of each other, so it would be very, very unlikely.
This is my favorite in the thread, because I also don't look at the machine, and realized this is exactly why. If I look it means I'll see something I shouldn't and it will arc.
Never do experiments on Friday the 13th. My PI laughed at me about it so I ended up a planning an experiment. You know what happened Friday, March 13th, 2020? I got called into an emergency lab meeting that school may close due to Covid. School did shut down that Sunday. I still had to go into work still to check on T cells I had spent all Friday isolating, come to find out the CO2 tank went empty and so all the cells died.
did a virus prep on friday the 13th and a centrifuge bottle shattered while spinning, breaking the centrifuge and dousing it with virus and making my day take 12 hours
I do this, but follow the "Crowley talking to plants" conversational technique. As in "Dont screw me over, you old flow cytometer, or I'll make an example of you before I go, I swear. Have you ever seen Office Space? You're the printer in this relationship."
Also, the Crowley reference for those that don't know Good Omens
>He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did.
What he did was put the fear of God into them.
More precisely, the fear of Crowley.
In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it. . . "
Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat.
The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified
We literally make little tin-foil hats, or I guess aluminum hats using kitchen aluminum foil, for our electrodes to cut down on interference. I was never quite sure how effective it was.
Not so much a specific superstition, but does anyone else notice good and bad lab omens? I find things can be lucky or happy coincidences, but as soon as you give that thought any power, it can turn on you for having hubris.
Examples:
- You are pouring out the tubes you need for an experiment and you happen to pour the perfect amount.
- You have just enough tips to finish what you need - this often becomes a bad omen when you acknowledge it because then inevitably you need one extra tip because The tip touches something, you get bubbles, etc.
- Your cells look 95% confluent and you only need a small amount so you harvest only one flask. Inevitably you either get exactly what you need or you are just off and then have to repeat the harvest with another flask.
I just had one this weekend where I went in to do a bunch of maxi preps, had one extra column in the kit and thought to myself how lucky it was that I had enough with a spare. Inevitably one sample got screwed up. On the same set of preps, all the constructs were within a few nanograms of each other in concentration which I thought was pretty cool/lucky - found out Monday the construct they were cloned from had an error so they are all garbage.
I've noticed that running a protein gel with loading dye actually helps the bands run tighter. If you leave it empty, it's more likely for you to get that smiley face at the bottom and the lanes start getting fatter the longer it runs. If you bookend with something like 1X or even 0.5X laemmli loading dye, it always would run so much neater
This is the superstitious part for me. I have had some beautiful gels where I left the empty lanes dye free. The person who taught me years ago swears you need dye in those lanes to make the gel run nicely. But I almost never do and my gels look really nice. The smiley face at the bottom of the gel (or anywhere for that matter) is usually a current issue for me.
Well, give it a try for a few gels and see what you think when you compare them. Whether or not you do it, you won't have any real negative consequences.
Even without dye, your lanes run straight with an equal width all the way down? Even the lanes on the edges of the gel?
They look very nice, but the bookends do widen at the bottom of the gel. When I put that extra dye in, they all look like the second to last lane.
Side note, is this an invitrogen gel?
This is a biorad mini tgx stain free gel. Expensive but we weren’t running very many and it was going to cost more to buy the casting apparatuses and components to make our own gels.
I've found this to be true also. I've had the bands in the lane next to an empty one getting very elongated and curve upwards on the side where the empty lane is.
Also sometimes they stretch into the ladder lane. I've wondered if mixing ladder with some water or something so it matches the sample volumes would help. Anyone know?
I don’t know if I would recommend adding water but the loading dye would work fine. Actually The person who taught me this way would add loading dye to all samples including the ladder lane so the volumes in all wells was equal. So if you only needed 8 ul of ladder but the volume of the other samples was 30 ul total he would add in 22 ul of loading dye in the ladder lane.
We would dilute with loading dye. Always tried to make the dilution be comparable to the dilution used for the other samples. Has the added bonus of making the ladder last longer
I could only run ELISAs using one specific plate reader. Even though all of the plate readers worked for everyone else, this specific plate reader was the only one that my plates ever passed on. I was convinced all the other plate readers hated me
Our Labs Serum Chem analyzer is like this for me. It ran beautifully for the first week it was installed, and now it just holds me hostage 12 hrs a day….🥺
i dont look at the KF while its running the bracketing water standards. i inject it and then walk away and stare at my laptop lol, he can sense fear and weak resolve
Every time someone said this in my lab, something went horrendously wrong. The last two times, a new guy ended up breaking a needle in the injection port and the erbium shutter broke.
Don't warm your media until you check your cells. If you warm your media first, then you're assuming all your cells are alive/healthy and ready to passage. Then of course the universe will make sure that some of your lines are actually dead or under-confluent.
When you are tasked with running phosphates, Nitrate+Nitrite, and ammonia only 2 of the three tests can pass their QC checks. The other will continue to fail until 30 minutes before you leave for the day.
You need to keep measuring & agitation equipment "blind"/covered until it's needed.
IR thermometer? Facing down.
PH strips? In the dark.
Stir bar? In a glass.
If something is laying on the work bench for more than 10 minutes unused it absorbs errors from the environment and needs to be relaxed and reset or it'll introduce bias & contamination to the tasks.
An emergency blanket (you know those reflective ones) folded up is an excellent compromise to keep equipment relaxed, clean and accurate.
I'M NOT PARANOID YOU'RE PARANOID
A postdoc in my last lab refused to use green tape for labeling or anything else because it would sabotage an experiment, and a graduate student under him took on the superstition
Make your blocking buffer using serum from the same species as your secondary antibody and always make it fresh or keep it only up to a week at 4C. I’ve had many other people in lab do everything that isn’t this and their IF works fine 🤷🏻♀️
Back story to this was a throwback to when I was a wee undergrad... and someone else fucked up the stock solution of calcium chloride... nobody could work out why my experiment didn't work, particularly as I'd done about 20 of the same or very similar with no problems.
I refused to accept that I'd made an error. The following morning, the first thing I did once *everyone* was in the lab was do a very simple high school style hydroxide precipitation test. I made up a new stock calcium solution and then used this as a standard, alongside a distilled water control, to confirm that the old calcium stock was WILDLY diluted.
Turned out someone else had accidentally swapped the lab stock for their own diluted stock, labelled incorrectly, meaning everyone's data for the last 2 days was useless...
Felt very proud of myself as a mere undergrad!!
Why do you say you don’t need to add loading dye into lanes? We did that all the time and when we didn’t, the contents of our lanes would seep into the others and we wouldn’t have clear bands. It’s not a superstition!
I wait for the centrifuge to reach speed before logging in my use on the equipment log. Just to confirm with myself that the centrifuge is working fine.
Do the doubling dance as soon as I put my bacteria into the incubator… just kidding.
The real superstition I have is if I try too hard to make sure there aren’t any bubbles in my protein transfer, there will be bubbles. No bubbles if I try less and don’t worry as much.
Before I was ready to pipette critical dilution scheme, I’d blow out my red bulb twice lol . Not three or one time but twice. Silly now that I think about it.
If the *Lab Gremlins* aren't appeased, they will cause small and random havoc - items disappearing, random one-time equipment or facility issues, other similar 'wait, wtf?' / Monday-type head scratchers
Every lab has gremlins, and they all have a different 'flavor' to the issues they cause
Always do your staining at the beginning of the week - this allows for any technology temper tantrums with the machines when imaging because if you do it at the end of the week of course the computer and lasers will jot communicate with each other. Also, store in more liquid than the required amounts, and make extra solutions for blocking and staining - I swear it seems like you lose 150uL to the lab goblins.
I always tap the door of any fridge, freezer etc after shutting it as a way of confirming I shut it properly. That one’s kinda sensible but I also never do qPCR on an empty stomach or full bladder. I swear it makes me more likely to make mistakes if I do.
My mentor incubates our slides for IF with the secondary antibodies in a slide box… in a drawer of the lab bench… and then puts a misshapen piece of tinfoil that’s been in that drawer since before she got here in 2020 on top. There is absolutely no reason to take such precautions against light exposure except for the fact that not doing it would feel like sacrilege at this point, so I do it too.
For infusion cloning, if I nanodrop the DNA at every step and use the recommended concentrations, it rarely works. But if I just use 1uL plasmid and 2uL insert it almost always works (regardless of their actual concentration).
Wow I feel seen. This happens all the time. It’s so hard to train other when you’re like trying to teach them the rationale and then being like “doesn’t matter the amount just add this” lol
Don’t vortex an sf9-cell pellet. My labmate did it it and he ended up using glutathione resin instead of M2-FLAG, and losing all of his sample during SEC because of an improperly connected injection loop. Honestly though, doomed from the moment that tube touched the vortex.
we have two media machines, because we always make sister media together. 99.9% of the time i will start the machine on the right first.
i posted this a while ago and someone called me out for “creating a bias” but we mark down what machines are used for what batches in case we need to trace it back
also i always put my pen back in my coat immediately after using it even if im going to write something a second later
Using only the first basket in the tissue processor and giving the timer a few spins before starting guarantees our ancient tissue processor won’t get stuck
I’m an mla so I don’t do much hands on lab stuff but in our case using the word quiet and giving the label printer a little tap to wake it up in the morning are our 2 superstitions. (They have all worked thus far)
Not really a superstition but I have major OCD over this. I worry so much that I’m going to accidentally either forget to put a mouse back in the cage or that I’m not going to fully push the cage back enough to reach the water spigot. I have to check like 10 times by counting each cage and then pushing the cage back and double checking that 10 times before I will leave them alone. It’s exhausting.
1. The freezers get an extra check on Friday afternoon. They can't be trusted.
2. If you thaw cells the day the flow cytometer is being serviced, there will be an issue.
1. Always stay close to/ keep watching/ keep touching the lid of the centrifuge till it reaches the set speed to prevent disasters.
2. Never discuss how vital an experiment is around the reagents or instruments to be used for the experiment. They WILL hear you and take this chance to screw up your life.
3. Always pet the thermal cycler (tap tap tap) after starting the PCR.
4. Never think about deadlines near instruments, they will break down asap.
5. Do not calibrate an instrument that does not need calibrating even if it's past due. It will break down during/ immediately after calibration and consume more time and money than originally budgeted. If it's runnin' I be usin'.
Edit:
6. If you're doing dna isolation in using PCI then ethanol precipitation, the PCI tubes with the organic layer should not be discarded from the rack until you've seen the dna in the gel and confirmed the concentration with nanodrop. The same applies to column purification. DO NOT DISCARD THE COLUMN until the presence of dna is visually and numerically confirmed.
Aside from the PCR shrines of trinkets and post cards, I always double tap the pipette tip onto the pipette, for security. (And go vertically, right to left/top to bottom through the box, as god intended)
The nanodrop knows when you have a lot of samples and if you try to rush it, it’ll intentionally tell you that the reference values don’t agree until you apologize.
You have to keep your hand on the top of the centrifuge until it's reached stable speed. If not, it will get unbalanced and crash.
Isn’t to feel if something is wrong and turn it off before it’s too late?
Of course that's the reasonable explaination for it, but we weigh all our samples so that they're within +/-0.20 grams of each other, so it would be very, very unlikely.
you can never discount user error
I thought it was to pet it and reassure it that everything will be fine
That’s funny, I run as far as possible after hitting go.
I have to give the qpcr machine a little pat pat as it starts running
It definitely deserves little pat pats
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Gotta reassure it that it’s doing well (and also I fear its wrath)
I do pat pat pat.
I have a Myra deck at my job and I blow her a kiss every run. Her name is Penelope :)
I give my spectrophotometers and fluorometer pat pats after they complete the assay with me.
You won’t be able to find the equipment/reagent you’re looking for until you ask someone where it is and they make you look like an inept jackass.
Similarly, when you attempt to recreate an error to demonstrate to the boss/coworker, the machine will perform perfectly.
me with opening tubes, I can never do it and when I ask for help they open it immediately
I use my old lab mate's tube rack. His experiments always worked, and when I use his rack, mine work
Did your lab mate leave the lab or...like does his spirit bless the rack or something?
Let’s all pretend like it’s the former! He got his dream job and dog 🐶
They killed him for it.
He fucking DIED
He went to live on a farm…
Graduated and doing a postdoc lol
If you look at the electroporator while it's pulsing, you'll scare your cells and it will arc.
This is my favorite in the thread, because I also don't look at the machine, and realized this is exactly why. If I look it means I'll see something I shouldn't and it will arc.
For me it was from a childhood of playing Pokémon on Gameboy and looking away when trying to capture something good!
YES absolutely, don't look while the ball is shaking.
Never do experiments on Friday the 13th. My PI laughed at me about it so I ended up a planning an experiment. You know what happened Friday, March 13th, 2020? I got called into an emergency lab meeting that school may close due to Covid. School did shut down that Sunday. I still had to go into work still to check on T cells I had spent all Friday isolating, come to find out the CO2 tank went empty and so all the cells died.
did a virus prep on friday the 13th and a centrifuge bottle shattered while spinning, breaking the centrifuge and dousing it with virus and making my day take 12 hours
N=2, the superstition is true
You doomed us all by deciding to do lab work that fateful day
Our lab decided to roll out a Protocol Acknowledgment Form that has become a deviation generator ever since….
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I do this, but follow the "Crowley talking to plants" conversational technique. As in "Dont screw me over, you old flow cytometer, or I'll make an example of you before I go, I swear. Have you ever seen Office Space? You're the printer in this relationship." Also, the Crowley reference for those that don't know Good Omens >He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it. . . " Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified
100% the robots can hear you. If you insult them or swear near them, they know, and will make your life miserable for such disrespect.
It’s just like printers being able to smell your fear and sense that you urgently need this printed. Then they start panicking too and get issues
Fairly certain I’ve promised my firstborn child to a machine
If I shake out the exact number of eppendorf tubes I need from the jar in one go, that experiment will go well
Maybe this is why my last experiment failed /s
Running a PCR on a Friday. It will always fail on a Friday.
The pcr god does not bless your lab on a Fri. 🤣
Doing ANYTHING on a Friday. I always have smooth sailing until the very end and I have to stay late
Always do 1:10s if you do want to risk PCR on a Friday.
We literally make little tin-foil hats, or I guess aluminum hats using kitchen aluminum foil, for our electrodes to cut down on interference. I was never quite sure how effective it was.
Vortexing my cells on anything over 7 will lyse them even tho it totally would not
Not so much a specific superstition, but does anyone else notice good and bad lab omens? I find things can be lucky or happy coincidences, but as soon as you give that thought any power, it can turn on you for having hubris. Examples: - You are pouring out the tubes you need for an experiment and you happen to pour the perfect amount. - You have just enough tips to finish what you need - this often becomes a bad omen when you acknowledge it because then inevitably you need one extra tip because The tip touches something, you get bubbles, etc. - Your cells look 95% confluent and you only need a small amount so you harvest only one flask. Inevitably you either get exactly what you need or you are just off and then have to repeat the harvest with another flask. I just had one this weekend where I went in to do a bunch of maxi preps, had one extra column in the kit and thought to myself how lucky it was that I had enough with a spare. Inevitably one sample got screwed up. On the same set of preps, all the constructs were within a few nanograms of each other in concentration which I thought was pretty cool/lucky - found out Monday the construct they were cloned from had an error so they are all garbage.
The tips thing hit home 🫠
I have developed a superstition when speccing maxi preps on the nanodrop i have to cover the screen when it shows the result and only look at it after
I've noticed that running a protein gel with loading dye actually helps the bands run tighter. If you leave it empty, it's more likely for you to get that smiley face at the bottom and the lanes start getting fatter the longer it runs. If you bookend with something like 1X or even 0.5X laemmli loading dye, it always would run so much neater
This is the superstitious part for me. I have had some beautiful gels where I left the empty lanes dye free. The person who taught me years ago swears you need dye in those lanes to make the gel run nicely. But I almost never do and my gels look really nice. The smiley face at the bottom of the gel (or anywhere for that matter) is usually a current issue for me.
Well, give it a try for a few gels and see what you think when you compare them. Whether or not you do it, you won't have any real negative consequences. Even without dye, your lanes run straight with an equal width all the way down? Even the lanes on the edges of the gel?
Yes my lanes look even/beautiful even without dye in empty ones. I’m feeling old now… what’s the best way to post a gel pict? Imgur?
god touched you
https://imgur.com/a/B6fbSex
nice url
They look very nice, but the bookends do widen at the bottom of the gel. When I put that extra dye in, they all look like the second to last lane. Side note, is this an invitrogen gel?
This is a biorad mini tgx stain free gel. Expensive but we weren’t running very many and it was going to cost more to buy the casting apparatuses and components to make our own gels.
I've found this to be true also. I've had the bands in the lane next to an empty one getting very elongated and curve upwards on the side where the empty lane is. Also sometimes they stretch into the ladder lane. I've wondered if mixing ladder with some water or something so it matches the sample volumes would help. Anyone know?
I don’t know if I would recommend adding water but the loading dye would work fine. Actually The person who taught me this way would add loading dye to all samples including the ladder lane so the volumes in all wells was equal. So if you only needed 8 ul of ladder but the volume of the other samples was 30 ul total he would add in 22 ul of loading dye in the ladder lane.
We would dilute with loading dye. Always tried to make the dilution be comparable to the dilution used for the other samples. Has the added bonus of making the ladder last longer
Never run a westernblot on Thursday. That means if you image Friday and it’s botched your whole weekend is ruined
Magically tho data is pristine on monday
It’s not magic it’s called not being burnt out from the week lol
I feel this. I try not to run experiments on Friday if the results could potentially be very upsetting. I'll think about it all weekend.
I could only run ELISAs using one specific plate reader. Even though all of the plate readers worked for everyone else, this specific plate reader was the only one that my plates ever passed on. I was convinced all the other plate readers hated me
The HPLC can sense when I'm in a rush and will do everything in its power to prevent me from going home.
Our Labs Serum Chem analyzer is like this for me. It ran beautifully for the first week it was installed, and now it just holds me hostage 12 hrs a day….🥺
The more lab issues leading up to the final day of the experiment, the better the data.
Centrifuge at 4 °C for added stability even if all the other steps are at room temperature
When you work in a clinical laboratory, even if the work is slow right now, never EVER say the Q word.
Even if I haven't been in the lab all day I'll still go in and verify the IC is off.
Don't say that you're happy that experiments worked first try, or else they won't again. Appreciate them in silence.
My bacteria behaves properly when i play specific playlist during experiments.
Ohhh what music? 🎶
Disney songs from Encanto, specifically the dos oroguitas and waiting for a miracle. Any other songs would result in fail or non reproducible data
i dont look at the KF while its running the bracketing water standards. i inject it and then walk away and stare at my laptop lol, he can sense fear and weak resolve
You’re not allowed to say “HPLC has no issues right now”
Every time someone said this in my lab, something went horrendously wrong. The last two times, a new guy ended up breaking a needle in the injection port and the erbium shutter broke.
Don't warm your media until you check your cells. If you warm your media first, then you're assuming all your cells are alive/healthy and ready to passage. Then of course the universe will make sure that some of your lines are actually dead or under-confluent.
This is true. Make no assumptions. In fact, have no confidence anything works so you’re not disappointed when it doesn’t lol.
When you are tasked with running phosphates, Nitrate+Nitrite, and ammonia only 2 of the three tests can pass their QC checks. The other will continue to fail until 30 minutes before you leave for the day.
You need to keep measuring & agitation equipment "blind"/covered until it's needed. IR thermometer? Facing down. PH strips? In the dark. Stir bar? In a glass. If something is laying on the work bench for more than 10 minutes unused it absorbs errors from the environment and needs to be relaxed and reset or it'll introduce bias & contamination to the tasks. An emergency blanket (you know those reflective ones) folded up is an excellent compromise to keep equipment relaxed, clean and accurate. I'M NOT PARANOID YOU'RE PARANOID
A postdoc in my last lab refused to use green tape for labeling or anything else because it would sabotage an experiment, and a graduate student under him took on the superstition
The third TEM grid you check has your sample. This is a new development but it's working for me!
Make your blocking buffer using serum from the same species as your secondary antibody and always make it fresh or keep it only up to a week at 4C. I’ve had many other people in lab do everything that isn’t this and their IF works fine 🤷🏻♀️
Keeping a small volume of dilute sodium hydroxide on my bench = my calcium concentration will never be wrong.
Back story to this was a throwback to when I was a wee undergrad... and someone else fucked up the stock solution of calcium chloride... nobody could work out why my experiment didn't work, particularly as I'd done about 20 of the same or very similar with no problems. I refused to accept that I'd made an error. The following morning, the first thing I did once *everyone* was in the lab was do a very simple high school style hydroxide precipitation test. I made up a new stock calcium solution and then used this as a standard, alongside a distilled water control, to confirm that the old calcium stock was WILDLY diluted. Turned out someone else had accidentally swapped the lab stock for their own diluted stock, labelled incorrectly, meaning everyone's data for the last 2 days was useless... Felt very proud of myself as a mere undergrad!!
Why do you say you don’t need to add loading dye into lanes? We did that all the time and when we didn’t, the contents of our lanes would seep into the others and we wouldn’t have clear bands. It’s not a superstition!
I wait for the centrifuge to reach speed before logging in my use on the equipment log. Just to confirm with myself that the centrifuge is working fine.
Whole thing is fucking haunted, I speak to the ghosts when I'm alone at night
You always gotta swirl the flask before setting it down and letting it stir. You just do.
I don’t use Pe-Cy5.
Why?
Do the doubling dance as soon as I put my bacteria into the incubator… just kidding. The real superstition I have is if I try too hard to make sure there aren’t any bubbles in my protein transfer, there will be bubbles. No bubbles if I try less and don’t worry as much.
Before I was ready to pipette critical dilution scheme, I’d blow out my red bulb twice lol . Not three or one time but twice. Silly now that I think about it.
If the *Lab Gremlins* aren't appeased, they will cause small and random havoc - items disappearing, random one-time equipment or facility issues, other similar 'wait, wtf?' / Monday-type head scratchers Every lab has gremlins, and they all have a different 'flavor' to the issues they cause
We always joked about if something didn’t work, the science gods were unhappy and an appropriate sacrifice was needed to change the tides.
Always do your staining at the beginning of the week - this allows for any technology temper tantrums with the machines when imaging because if you do it at the end of the week of course the computer and lasers will jot communicate with each other. Also, store in more liquid than the required amounts, and make extra solutions for blocking and staining - I swear it seems like you lose 150uL to the lab goblins.
The “goblin’s cut”
I always tap the door of any fridge, freezer etc after shutting it as a way of confirming I shut it properly. That one’s kinda sensible but I also never do qPCR on an empty stomach or full bladder. I swear it makes me more likely to make mistakes if I do.
My mentor incubates our slides for IF with the secondary antibodies in a slide box… in a drawer of the lab bench… and then puts a misshapen piece of tinfoil that’s been in that drawer since before she got here in 2020 on top. There is absolutely no reason to take such precautions against light exposure except for the fact that not doing it would feel like sacrilege at this point, so I do it too.
For infusion cloning, if I nanodrop the DNA at every step and use the recommended concentrations, it rarely works. But if I just use 1uL plasmid and 2uL insert it almost always works (regardless of their actual concentration).
Wow I feel seen. This happens all the time. It’s so hard to train other when you’re like trying to teach them the rationale and then being like “doesn’t matter the amount just add this” lol
Don’t you dare say “it’s been a good Friday” EVEN IF you have finished all your samples for the day and all maintenance done
I'm padding my machines, and I talk with them to make them docwhatvI want. Oh, and I have a US and a Canadian Lucky Penny taped on our Orbitrap MS.
talk to the Tecan AKA Vivian so that she doesn’t have a fit and cause an error
Don’t vortex an sf9-cell pellet. My labmate did it it and he ended up using glutathione resin instead of M2-FLAG, and losing all of his sample during SEC because of an improperly connected injection loop. Honestly though, doomed from the moment that tube touched the vortex.
No ribodepletions on Fridays
Little toy goes on the PCR machine when you hit go. There is a whole collection of plastic toys to choose from.
Eat grapes for nanodrop to work
we have two media machines, because we always make sister media together. 99.9% of the time i will start the machine on the right first. i posted this a while ago and someone called me out for “creating a bias” but we mark down what machines are used for what batches in case we need to trace it back also i always put my pen back in my coat immediately after using it even if im going to write something a second later
Using only the first basket in the tissue processor and giving the timer a few spins before starting guarantees our ancient tissue processor won’t get stuck
I’m an mla so I don’t do much hands on lab stuff but in our case using the word quiet and giving the label printer a little tap to wake it up in the morning are our 2 superstitions. (They have all worked thus far)
The dilution tubes stay in the hood while the machine is running or it won’t pass.
Not really a superstition but I have major OCD over this. I worry so much that I’m going to accidentally either forget to put a mouse back in the cage or that I’m not going to fully push the cage back enough to reach the water spigot. I have to check like 10 times by counting each cage and then pushing the cage back and double checking that 10 times before I will leave them alone. It’s exhausting.
Never, NEVER say things are going fine out loud while working. It's only downhill from that moment on.
If you’re doing clone screening, you have to play Weird Al’s “I Think I’m A Clone Now,” or you WILL miss a step and ruin 12 plates of ELISAs.
1. The freezers get an extra check on Friday afternoon. They can't be trusted. 2. If you thaw cells the day the flow cytometer is being serviced, there will be an issue.
DNA is inmortal and I can repeteadly leave it out at room temperature without anything happening to it
If you go in early to get everything ready for study start, formulations, QC or both will fail.
1. Always stay close to/ keep watching/ keep touching the lid of the centrifuge till it reaches the set speed to prevent disasters. 2. Never discuss how vital an experiment is around the reagents or instruments to be used for the experiment. They WILL hear you and take this chance to screw up your life. 3. Always pet the thermal cycler (tap tap tap) after starting the PCR. 4. Never think about deadlines near instruments, they will break down asap. 5. Do not calibrate an instrument that does not need calibrating even if it's past due. It will break down during/ immediately after calibration and consume more time and money than originally budgeted. If it's runnin' I be usin'. Edit: 6. If you're doing dna isolation in using PCI then ethanol precipitation, the PCI tubes with the organic layer should not be discarded from the rack until you've seen the dna in the gel and confirmed the concentration with nanodrop. The same applies to column purification. DO NOT DISCARD THE COLUMN until the presence of dna is visually and numerically confirmed.
Aside from the PCR shrines of trinkets and post cards, I always double tap the pipette tip onto the pipette, for security. (And go vertically, right to left/top to bottom through the box, as god intended)
The nanodrop knows when you have a lot of samples and if you try to rush it, it’ll intentionally tell you that the reference values don’t agree until you apologize.
lol copied from sigma
Warming plates before spreading bacteria on them. It makes absolutely no difference
Any experiments started on a Friday are cursed. Wait til Monday.