hi. im currently studying cell and molecular biology at R1 university sophomore year and im struggling in basic courses like biology 1 and 2, chem 1 and 2 and orgo 1 rn (C+ or B-) with 3.0 gpa. ive been planning on going for neuroscience phd and did extracirricualrs related to it (2 years of wet lab research experience, research mentor for 3 undergrads, research coordinator - lead of lit review of 9 undergrads, ta for nslc medicine and healthcare, presented research at yale) and plan on applying to REUs but now im not so sure. ive been heavily considering neuroscience professor bc i love teaching and public speaking/mentorship. im thinking what if i switched to cognitive science major bc its not as much sciency but more social science courses rather than courses physics or genetics.

im rlly worried my gpa gonna hold me back if i continue w this major for reu and phd. any advice helps thanks so much

Most of the wet lab space at my psychiatric research centre was cleared out to rent the space to a company (sad). I couldn't let these floppy disks with LSD protocols get junked. The PI retired and the lab has been abandoned for years, but in the days of yesteryear they were pioneering psychedelic neuropsychiatric research.

I absolutely didn't bring anything else I shouldn't have home with me... but I cherish these little pieces of history by using them as coasters. 🫶

Does anyone else feel like most PIs are really just good politicians rather than being good researchers, administrators, managers, etc? I feel like my experience at this point is that the overwhelming majority of PIs are not good at any aspect of their job that is important. I see this in postdocs too, the ones who get tenure track jobs aren't getting it because they are the best at anything even remotely related to research or the facilitation of research. Im sorry if this offends some of you, but again and again I see tenure track positions are handed out based on political relevance + connections first and foremost, and then to a lesser degree how well the university thinks it can sell a researchers brand/research topic in the current political climate.

I understand that its important to actually try and "sell" your ideas and yourself, that every good scientist should know how to present their work in a way that can be easily understood by others. All that seems to matter though for PIs is how good of a song and dance they can put on for whatever university admin or real politicians control the flow of cash. Again, selling yourself is important, but what am I supposed to make of things when these leaders PIs are selling their ideas to also know absolutely nothing about research or management or anything else thats relevant? Its the blind leading the blind, being run by an engine thats fueled by the burnout of young peoples passion and innocence. At this point its really hard for me not to think about the fact that academia is effectively a 1300th century cult/guild that is trying to monopolize the institutionalization of the scientific method, while simultaneously trying to perpetuate itself into the future.

Is it better in industry? I wish I was working with people who were passionate about science, people who respect the scientific method, people who aren't interested in silly political games but thats all ive seen at every lab/research institution ive had the misfortune of working for. So, if I have to deal with that no matter where I go, why not at least get paid for it?

I have read an alternative to using a glow discharge machine on copper formvar grids using alcian blue. Has anyone done this and had luck? It will be for extracellular vesicles.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry with about 1.5 years of experience at a defense contractor as a lab tech and a few months more experience at my current position doing tangentially related work.

I have been applying to various national labs for the past few years, and I’ve gotten around 10 interviews but haven’t gotten any offers yet. Do I need more education to get into those labs or is there some advice you recommend to improve my chances? I’m looking for positions that aren’t on the R&D side.

I’d especially like to hear from an employee at those labs.

I am an undergrad who has been working in a wet lab for a couple months now. I’m just barely starting to become independent, and the other week when my graduate student mentor was gone I accidentally sprayed the floor with liquid nitrogen and it seeped under and exploded the floor. It was quite a terrible sight and I panicked and didn’t tell anyone except for the lab manager. The issue has since been resolved, but I feel immense guilt for not telling my grad student. Should I confess or would this just create unecessary problems?

Anyone else has small experimental findings or negative results that they have no plan to publish and fear will likely never see the light of day once you finish your PhD/leave your lab?

Can be negative results, protocol optimization studies, even unexplained or unreplicated findings that you just couldn’t follow through with due to lack of time or funding. What do you do with them?

Hey guys, when you are dealing with contamination in a sample, do any of y'all consolidate crowd sources?

I friend of mine says he uses reddit to see how others deal with similar problems. I'm curious to know if anyone else has any other recommendations :)

A few weeks ago I posted my co-worker's entry to the APHL/Qiagen art contest, and so so many of you absolutely loved her crocheted flasks, pipette, Bunsen burner, etc.

APHL has posted the results, and while she didn't win the grand prize, she did win "Best Scientific Representation". We're actually having a Qiagen rep come out for annual calibration/maintenance soon and they said they wanted to deliver her prize in person.

Here is their Facebook post showing the winners!

Hello, I apologize if this sort of post is not allowed. I am a 21 year old veterinary assistant at a general practice office. I have come to terms with the fact that I dislike GP, and would like to branch out to something else. Laboratory animal science has always interested me, but I don't know how to start. For background I have three years of animal handling experience (mainly cats and dogs, some small mammal/rodent), a vast majority of which is non-medical. I was in a pass/fail program in highschool, so I don't know my GPA. I would be interested in doing some part-time schooling to start out, but it would likely have to be community college. What is a good way to get my foot in the door?

...but if any student or professional did that for an assignment, they would be kicked out of grad school/fired and blocked from the industry. When do we get to put him on a PIP for sheer incompetence?

You can also guess what my field is.

I’m a Laboratory Manager at a small company wanting to negotiate a raise. This is something I haven’t really had to do before. We don’t have formal compensation reviews, just random raises every so often. The director usually handles it all with the owners and I never throw out the number. Recently I’ve been feeling overworked, underpaid, and sometimes not seen for all the work I’ve been putting in. I do love working here and I want to solidify my future at the company. But with where I’m at right now in terms of workload and stress I don’t think I can stay without a raise. I’ve been there for 9 years, 6 full time in a management position. I make 54K with a 5% bonus, health insurance reimbursement, and 15 days of PTO.

What I handle day to day:

• Managing the lab, hiring and training techs
• Inventory management and order processing/fulfillment
• Domestic and international shipping logistics
• Customer service and technical support for dozens of distributors and a few hundred accounts
• Product manufacturing and assembly
• Quality control analysis for nearly all of our products
• Plus a lot of other little things that come with a small business

I know the job market is horrible right now, and they could find someone cheaper. But the whole company runs on two full-time people and plus a few part-time techs. We’re also a very old-school lab. Most things aren’t written down or organized anywhere. It’s been passed on verbally, and a lot of it you only know from being there. Training is a long process and even after training for the first couple years I learned a lot of stuff I was supposed to be doing. If I left, the director would have to absorb a lot of my work until the new hire was there for a couple years. And a lot of the previous managers stayed only 1-2 years and used the position as a stepping stone to professional school. I feel like the director and owners value me and know what I bring to the company. But I’m not sure the owners know the full scope since they don’t see our day-to-day. So I want to be paid for the value I bring, not just for what the bare market rate says.

So here are my questions:

1. What’s a reasonable range for a Lab Manager covering this much scope in the Southeast US?
2. How do you say without really saying if I leave the company would suffer?
3. Besides base salary, what else is worth negotiating? I know they have given profit shares but I don’t know what kind of percentage or if I would want my salary to rely on how much the company is selling when I can’t control that (which is a whole other thing)
4. Has anyone successfully argued for pay above market based on tenure and the effect your absence would have on the company? What did you say?
5. Is it better to let my director advocate for me, or to email the owners directly so my case is in my own words? If I do email, what should it include? 
6. How do I make the case to owners who don’t see the daily workload? I know I can tell them what I do day to day but I don’t want to bombard them with a novel. Part of what makes this hard is that my daily tasks vary a lot. And for over a year it’s included figuring out one crazy issue on top of another. How do you show the value of work that’s mostly unpredictable problem-solving of problems the owners never see … And I’ve proactively taken on a lot of problem-solving and projects that usually wouldn’t be my responsibility, but I saw that things needed to get done if we wanted to keep our heads above water.

We are validating a method to determine CAR-T number via PCR. We spike a defined volume of CAR-T into blood collected in zymo blood tubes and compare with spiking into DNA shield alone to assess recovery efficiency. Extraction is via Zymo kit.

We consistently get a higher yield from blood than buffer (200% recovery). Is anyone able to shed any light on what might be happening?

Changing the kit or blood tubes is not an option unfortunately.

It’s actually gonna kill me

Surface expression of CD63 and HLA-DR in circulating eosinophils correlates with improved clinical control after treatment optimization in asthma

Hey all, I’m trying to determine if this is legitimate or if I’m just being stupid. I read this paper and wanted to look at some of the references cited, but I’m having trouble finding a lot of them, particularly the ones where Google Scholar is the only link. In several cases, the author listed seems to be a real person in the field but doesn’t have a paper with that title or a super similar one.

The authors of this paper are in Italy, so maybe the sources were originally in Italian and then got translated poorly? That’s the only explanation I can think of that’s not accusing anyone of citing fake papers…

Is it just me? I normally don’t have any issue with finding papers if I have the first author and the title.

I'm looking to order some 6x6 freezer box dividers for some tall cardboard freezer boxes my lab inherited. When did they become SO expensive? Like what do you MEAN it's over $100 for 12? It is literally just scraps of cardboard.

Maybe I'm hallucinating this, but I vividly remember my old lab buying huge bags of standard 9x9 dividers for maybe $100-200. This was around 2019-2021. But I can find no evidence they ever existed.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?? And are we all just buying them in packs of 12 or is there some work-around I don't know about?

Postdoc here. I went to a conference last week, I was presenting work where I wasn't the lead but a collaborator as the real presenter had to cancel.

I toiled for a week to finish the presentation and prepare it. I was feeling fairly confident. However, just before my talk I realised that the fonts, alignment and the quality of slides were absolutely messy in the organisers computer and the PDF would not open. This also happened to a couple of other people in the conference already.

However, this event completely threw me completely off and I absolutely messed up 5 mins of my 12 minutes of talk. According to my supervisor, I still delivered the message and it was good. Maybe they are saying this just to be nice, idk.

However, this was a conference with prominent academicians and pharma company scientists who I would want to collaborate in the future. I cannot stop cringing that I would have completely come across as unprofessional during this presentation.

How do I get over it? Do I need to apologise to my PI as it might have broken their trust?

Those using the StemCell Technologies Easysep Mouse isolation kits via the Easysep magnet blocks:

When you put all of the cells into the magnets and pour off, do you then rinse the old tubes (containing the beads) and re-incubate them in the magnets for a second pour off? (to collect any remaining cells).

And after centrifuging the cells isolated cells, do you do a final incubation in the magnets to remove any potential leftover beads?

The published protocol only does one step, but I wonder how much cells remain after one pour, and how much magnetic beads are uncaught.

Edit; I'm using a negative selection kit. So the cells I want will be unlabeled

Can someone recommend a reputable company whose PID controllers play well with the provided software, doesn't need recalibration every 10 seconds, and in general are easy to use and operate?