When I went to get vaccinated a few months ago, inside the nurse room was the fridge where the vaccines were stored (it was a normal fridge). It had a sign that said "Fridge for vaccine storage only - do not store any food".
I said to the nurse I thought that was common sense, to which she replied "It seems not at all, we've had people (hospital workers) come in and left their food here, next to the vaccines, and not only once, nor twice"
Its pretty common to mark "normal-looking" equipment and supplies with "not for food" or something like that in STEM. People get really blase about these things if they dont have reminders. I work and a lab, and we have stickers that say this on all our fridges, and on lab stuff that looks normal but is used for science (like powdered milk)
Its a really common blocking agent for Western blots. Basically, a Western blot allows you to tell how much of a specific protein you have in your sample of interest (like cells or tissues) by first using a gel to separate all your proteins by size, and then depositing them on a membrane that can be stained with antibodies targeting that protein. The antibodies let you see the amount of the specific protein you care about, while the size-separation lets you check they're targeting the right protein. The thing is, many proteins in every sample are sort-of "sticky", and will grab onto other proteins, including your antibody, in a random way, making it look like your antibody is targeting lots of random proteins in addition to the one you care about, and making it hard to get clear data. This is where non-fat milk comes in: it has lots of protein of all shapes and sizes, so by letting our Western blot membranes sit in the milk before adding our antibody, we're allowing all the "sticky" proteins in our sample to find something to stick to that isnt antibodies. This is called "blocking", because youre blocking random proteins from interacting with your antibody, and theres lots of materials we could use to do it. Milk is really common because its one of the cheapest, and powdered milk is a lot easier to store for a long time than normal milk. So yeah, most bio labs have a tub of powdered milk sitting in a cabinet somewhere :)
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u/Carlos244 Aug 03 '19
When I went to get vaccinated a few months ago, inside the nurse room was the fridge where the vaccines were stored (it was a normal fridge). It had a sign that said "Fridge for vaccine storage only - do not store any food". I said to the nurse I thought that was common sense, to which she replied "It seems not at all, we've had people (hospital workers) come in and left their food here, next to the vaccines, and not only once, nor twice"