Life Science Tools of the Trade

I’ve ranted about Qiagen in the past. News Flash! It appears that we actually have a sales rep that gives a damn about us! Does that mean no more free movie tickets to a theatre 50 miles away to replace the $10 summer tote-bag that was back-ordered and we never got for ordering $10,000 worth of Maxi-Kits?
I wonder how many people are reading this blog after our mention in “The Scientist”? I’m still patiently waiting for the photo requests to come pouring in. Now we just need to fly the Caped Avenger to Durham for the group photo!
Oh, but back to science. I have been using Qiagen products for 10 years. What is that insoluble ball of crap that ends up in the bottom of your DNA after doing your $30 MaxiPrep? It must be some of the secret matrix that sloughs off during the elution step. It isn’t really a big deal when you get a nice yield from your prep (pcDNA for example) . Spin it down and throw away the fuzz and a bit of your DNA. However, if you are prepping some crap low-copy semi-toxic plasmid the “mystery fuzz” is a real inconvenience when you try and dissolve your miniscule amount of DNA in the fiberglass insoluble protective fuzz shield.

SAB thought: bummed about Nexins resigning
Book: “The Basic Eight” by Daniel Handler (AKA Lemony Snickett, yes that Lemony Snickett)
Music: “Rough Mix” Ronnie Lane and Pete Townshend ( a rare double purchase- vinyl and then cd)
Science Mood O’ Meter: “submitted” (cautiously optimistic)
Junk Food: Twizzlers
Recent analog to digital conversion: Frankie Yankovic’s “I Wish I Was Eighteen Again” (type-polka)

For those of you haven’t heard yet Qiagen is fool proofing their plasmid prep kits. We haven’t received the new kits in the lab yet but the rep has dropped off the literature. Apparently so many people were having problems doing a plasmid prep that Qiagen now has a color indicator in the buffers, LyseBlue as they like to refer to it. When you lyse your bacteria the solution turns blue and when you neutralize….it turns clear. I guess for some individuals they couldn’t tell that the solution got gooey and then the SDS precipitated giving white chunks.

Now I’m not saying that this color indicator is a bad idea. It never hurts for a company to idiot proof anything. In fact I really like the new color coding of the buffer bottles. I’ve managed to grab the wrong bottle and to try to lyse my bacteria before I’ve resuspended them! (I haven’t found a way of saving those samples.)

What concerns me are the individuals who can’t seem to get DNA from a kit. The rep has told me stories of support phone calls they receive and that they are hoping LyseBlue will solve some of these problems. I hope this solves these problems as well but if you’re in research and can’t master a plasmid prep….well…Good Luck!

Pretty content-free, a quickie if you like, but I thought the following article might be of interest to our reader: The opposite of eureka I: nurture — Mole 118 (16): 3567 — Journal of Cell Science.

The Mole makes an important point about testing reagents, and I must admit, this is something I’m very bad at. Maybe it’s something I should get good at, but often when you buy a kit there’s only enough reagent to do the experiments you want to do . . . it’s a courageous scientist who says

“I will ‘waste’ some of this kit to test that it’s OK.”

Surely that’s what (supplier-side) QA is all about? Yes, I know if we were working to ISO 9000 we’d probably have to do this anyway, but most of us aren’t. Most of us are ‘just in time’ scientists, and maybe we do need a sea change in our behaviour.

I need to go away and think about this.

Random science tip of the day: maxiprepped plasmid DNA is cleaner than a PCR prep. This is why the PCR prep ethanol pellet appears bigger than the plasmid ethanol pellet. Just saying.

Remember I wibbled about the IVGN stock fridge? Got a flyer in the post today from Promega. They’re introducing stock fridges with RFID scanning. The stock is tagged, so as you remove an item an order is automatically raised to restock.

This is a brilliant notion (not a new idea, I was planning a similar thing to keep my tonic stocked and cold at home ten years ago) but has potential pitfalls. Are multiple copies of the same stock item differently labelled (I can see someone in this lab deliberately waving the same item past the scanner so we end up with thirty thousand tubes of ligase)? How do we know who is taking the stuff? It’ll be a free for all, which is a killer if there are different budgets with access to the same fridge. Do we have it locked and hand keys out to appropriate people? Swipe cards? RFID-tagged post-docs? Now there’s an idea.

Non-random iTunes selection: ‘Summertime’ by Janis Joplin. A truly stunning arrangement.
Mood: Nectarine.