Life Science Tools of the Trade

Another week of failed experiments. I know bench scientists have failures, but what about computational biologists? Do they have bad weeks? How can “experiments” fail if you don’t do experiments? Drinking an old dust covered beer found in the cold room doesn’t help. Blah.

Lucky an irritating sales rep didn’t stop in this Friday PM.

What does this have to do with stamp collecting? Nothing.

Music: rare Springsteen import tracks from Japan (thanks Kenzo)
Mood ring color: black, jet black.
Weather: pissing down rain

We’ve officially heard that by December Bio-rad will no longer carry the old ready gel boxes or replacement parts. We knew it was only a matter of time but it’s taken awhile for us to transfer over to the new Criterion protein gels from Bio-rad. In general there hasn’t been any complaints with the switch. (The rep even gave us a free gel box and transfer unit to get us started) The larger gels have more wells so you can run more samples in the same amount of time as you would the smaller gels. That being said the general consensus is that these larger gels require a longer time to transfer to membrane. (All of us are really impatient and so we try to cut corners where ever possible!) That being said….I would transfer a minimum of 90 minutes with the plate electrode transfer box with these gels. I run rainbow markers and there have been a few times when they aren’t fully transferred at 60 minutes. Obviously sometimes it doesn’t matter but….when the samples are important or the protein isn’t expressed really well…take the time to let it transfer a bit longer.

P.S. There is a somber mood in the lab today…the music isn’t even playing! Not a good week for science.