Life Science Tools of the Trade

A sales rep stopped by the lab a few weeks ago. Noticing the blue wall of Qiagens he hawked their spin columns for mini-preps. The catch-you need to have Qiagen solutions leftover to use them (they only supply the columns). I took the two spin columns, tossed them on a shelf and forgot about them. Like an elephant, a sales reps never forgets (except the time she forget to get me a quote-no names, but you know who you are). “Have you tried those samples yet?” I had completely forgotten and just couldn’t get excited about saving a few pennies per sample, and those pennies were dependent upon having leftover solutions from another kit. I wonder how many times he’ll come back before he gives up on me and considers those two spin columns a write off? Oh, the company is Genesse Biosomething, thus the reference to a really really bad beer of my youth.

NEB #1-did you know that NEB enzymes will only cut in NEB buffers? Obviously, that is not true but I was told that once by a post-doc.
NEB #2-the NEB supplied BSA is great to use as a protein standard. I have never added it to a restriction digest.
NEB #3 their enzymes and catalog are top quality.

Caloric intake: ~1800 calories
Book: “Mongo -adventures in trash” by Ted Botha (a non-fiction book which examines the culture of dumpster diving/recycling).
Music: The Pleasure Barons “Live in Las Vegas”
Obscure hbogerd reference that is not worth mentioning: the seminal, yet nearly forgotten: “Human retrovirus-related synthetic peptides inhibit T lymphocyte proliferation”, Immunology Letters, 19 (1988) 7-14

Bonus question : Does publishing in journals with extremely low impact factors actually hurt your career?

I’m sitting here, trying to work out how I can mutate leucine into aspartate and simultaneously introduce a restriction site so that I can check if the mutagenesis worked with a simple digest rather than having to wait for sequencing. Let’s see . . . TTA to GAT, and there’s ATC before that - TCGA is palindromic, plus A and T . . . ClaI!

Page 214 of the NEB catalogue, I salute you.

I’ve known labs that don’t even use New England Biolabs (NEB) enzymes keep a copy of their catalogue. On the off chance that you’ve been living on Mars for the last decade or more and don’t know what I’m talking about (say ‘Hi’ to the rovers for me, and what did you do with Beagle 2?), the NEB catalogue is an indispensable reference. It is little exaggeration to claim that I use it every day when I’m doing molecular biology.

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