> lady without a lab coat with bracelets on her hands puts on gloves, scratches her hair and puts them into the laminar hood without even using alcohol
> another lady comes in
> she has her lab coat on
> proceedes to roll up her sleeves before putting them inside the laminar hood
> 3rd lady comes in
> she fricks around with her petri dishes
> starts playing 2048 on her phone while waiting for something to finish
> she puts her dirty phone-hands under the hood, without changing gloves or even using alcohol
> it's my turn to work
> "anon do you want me to turn on the UV light for you? Or do you just start right away?"
> tell her UV is a must
> "the frick she's talking about. No UV light between working with different cultures?"
> ask her if people sometimes don't use the UV ligtht
> "no, you always have to use it, but when there's little time between people you don't really want to wait for 30min"
> a random dude from environmental zoology department comes into the DNA isolation room
> his long hair almost touches the table he's working on
> refuses to tie the hair
> ask a random grad student how much DMSO I need to make 170ml of freezing medium
> he can barely do it with a whiteboard and calculator, let alone mentaly
> every table is covered with 1mm of dust
> random pieces of "lab notes" on every table
> everyone takes pipette tips at random, with no clear pattern
I started uni last year and I already can't stand those idiots
Share your real lab experience stories
homie why do you care if someone's working with dirty hands or some stupid shit like that. It's not your company, don't worry about it. Just do your job, collect your salary and do something fun with your life.
They're contaminating the labs I use. There were incidents with fungi destroying all cultures because "scientists" couldn't keep their equipement clea
Yes
If it's a uni lab full of freshmen, then you're going to be dealing with literal children many of whom have yet to master basic human hygiene let alone aseptic technique.
Anon, most of them are doing their PhDs or are "working scientists" at my uni
Well in that case it probably has more to do with running on 4 hours of sleep and living on ramen noodles and coffee
>There were incidents with fungi destroying all cultures because "scientists" couldn't keep their equipement clea
and without them we wouldn't have penicillin
Life imitates art imitates life
Donde están los senos?
>> every table is covered with 1mm of dust
Are you meant to be one of the smart biologists?
> everyone takes pipette tips at random, with no clear pattern
oh come on, it's still a pattern
I get it. There's a pulsing rage that builds when people are too vile to even take basic precautions to keep from contaminating the environment. Even with something as easy as handwashing and a glove change.
>UV
by boys just ignore it
they swim even faster after
>le freshman bio lab
Chemchads don’t have this problem. Natural selection weeds them out.
The thing is, I'm the only freshman there
>Run experiment
>Cultures fail
>"Try again anon"
>Try again
>Cultures fail
>Professor keeps making me try again
>Hardly any cultures survive
>Almost the end of the year and I lack data
>"Anon wtf is wrong with you? Let me do it"
>Professor's cultures fail
>"Oops haha there's fungal growth in the incubator only we had access to haha hope you can write your dissertation!"
how can i colorup Cyanobacteries here?
my goal to detect danger to human flora and fauna in the dirt
what is it?
static shit is dirt on my glass
>> a random dude from environmental zoology department comes into the DNA isolation room
>> his long hair almost touches the table he's working on
>> refuses to tie the hair
Based. Mogged. Dilate and keep seething.
what i can use for base glass?
I'm not a biologist, but the way I handle radioactive sources normally scares freshmen. b***h, by the time you set up an elaborate system of lead blocks and tweezers you have already gotten more dose than me if I just move it by hand in a second.
If you just started, is it possible that you have no feeling for the regulations and just want to follow the official procedure even if it doesn't make sense? I can't tell if there are scenarios in which what you described could be ok.
There aren't. If you have a specific task in a class lab that requires an area to be free from contamination, there's reasons for that.
So you're a student who tells researchers and phd candidates how to do their job, that you're currently learning and they have been doing successfully for years?
I'm not even OP, so untwist your panties. You have to keep everything as free from contamination as possible when you're working with microorganisms. If you're trying to work with specific microbes in a lab, you don't want to pick up other microorganisms that could potentially ruin the entire process.
When you go to the doctor for a UTI and they culture your urine to find whatever bacteria it is in your urinary tract that's causing an infection, do you want them giving you the wrong antibiotic or even just having to redo the culture because some idiot couldn't wear gloves and microorganisms from their hands ended up contaminating it?
Well they sure won't think that the lab assistant's dandruff comes from my dick.
If that dandruff is from a specific type of fungal scalp infection that also is found on the genitalia, you can win the grand prize of taking some antifungals that lower your testosterone.
Like I said I don't work with living things, so I don't have a good feeling for when you have to have a clean and when a sterile environment. Is there a 1% chance of contamination and can you repeat the experiment easily? I'd not wait half an hour. Is your measurement a one-of measurement and repeating it takes months and costs a million dollars? I'd sterilise everything 10 times.
Working with patient samples is different again.
Yes
say be pigment for Cyanobacteries
Why is all that necassary for simple culturing OP? I own a laminar hood and often dont even wear gloves or use alcohol at all, havent noticed any increase in contams.
appropriate antibiotics in the medium, washing hands, careful technique, UV lamps, and laminar flow are all on your side.
With absolutely perfect technique, you can get lucky with all the above without washing and/or barrier protection. But sooner or later, you will contaminate your work if your cultural practice is shoddy.
And real question is, it depends if you can even detect contamination, without DNA analysis or microscopy. And so you won't know until you've co-evolved some weird sporulating, antibiotic resistant shit that takes over your carefully propigated plates.
We're studying eccDNA, since there's so little of it in the nuclei we can't afford any contaminants. We have a special 9h long protocol just to get rid of the mitochondrial DNA
> start the cell culture
> 1 bottle of cells
> they grow, you divide them into 2 bottles
> then 4
> then 8
> you have 8 bottles but notice that some of the cells look kind of weird
> turns out they got contaminated
> 8 bottles into trash
> a month of work wasted
and like I said, our goal is to grow cells and isolate their DNA, since we're interested in rare extrachromosomal circular DNA fragments that you can find in the nuclei in very small quantities any contaminants will affect our measurements too much. For example we can't isolate DNA straight away, we have to isolate cell nuclei first (to get rid of mitochondrial DNA) and then we can isolate the circular fragments we want
PhD candidates are not that good at their job
the lab I work at is a cross department unit, people from the whole faculty of biology come to analyze their stuff. Most of them isolate tick dna, rarely anything human so they don't care about being clean all that much
>Same deal. No mercy, 1 warning ONLY.
yeah, it's just hard to have no mercy when you're the undergrad and they're either doing their PhDs or have "worked" at the lab for 10 years already. But imo 1 more year and I will know enough about lab work to openly tell them they're wrong, since now they could make something up and I would probably believe them since there are many things I don't know yet.
hard to do when you technically work at 3 different labs, because equipement is scattered over the whole building
What do those circular DNA fragments do?
They replicate separately from chromosomes and since they lack centromeres they divide in weird ways when cell undergoes mitosis. You end up with some cells that have none and some that have a lot of ecc. We're working on finding a link between ecc and cancer, since it appears it's more common in cancerous cells
>the lab I work at is a cross department unit, people from the whole faculty of biology come to analyze their stuff. Most of them isolate tick dna, rarely anything human so they don't care about being clean all that much
Doesn't matter, good laboratory practice applies to all.
As for the PhDs, the same applies. If you don't follow good laboratory practice then you don't work in the lab, simple as.
If you know the laboratory practices, then they too should know them.
This is basic lab safety and hygiene 101.
That's just the state of science, especially biology in my country. All science is at its low right now but biology especially since it's treated as a major for people who scored too low to study medicine. Just the fact that out of all STEM faculties faculty of biology is the only one without a solid math, statistics and metrology course. I had to go to the chemists' library to get a calculus textbook.
My undergraduate lab was like this, until I arrived. First week, after hours, I went in and cleaned the shit out of the whole lab.
Then I started berating the shit out of anything that wasn't right. You have to establish, and maintain, a culture of excellence.
Don't go "up the chain", unless someone is continually violating correct technique. Be direct, be forceful, and be blunt. Don't put up with any shit.
Create discussions about the lab and technique frequently in meetings with the PI. Don't rat on people though, just talk to them directly. Give reasons for why correct technique must be followed and the possible consequences for the experiment and/or lab safety.
> random dude from environmental zoology department comes into the DNA isolation room
How was this even possible?
>ask a random grad student how much DMSO I need to make 170ml of freezing medium
> he can barely do it with a whiteboard and calculator, let alone mentaly
Don't judge students by on-the-spot interrogation; you may simply be catching them on their worst days, or moments.
> every table is covered with 1mm of dust
This is not, in fact, a laboratory. No scientist of any quality would tolerate this. No quality work is possible in that environment
> everyone takes pipette tips at random, with no clear pattern
Everyone needs to get on the same page; but honeslty if you are doing clean room work, you will never have satisfaction without making sure everyone uses their own tips.
>> lady without a lab coat with bracelets on her hands puts on gloves, scratches her hair and puts them into the laminar hood without even using alcohol
This is a full stop violation, and she needs to spend the next half hour getting instruction and the next half hour cleaning the shit out of the hood. Then she needs to be informed the next time it happens, she gets her ass kicked out the lab.
> she puts her dirty phone-hands under the hood, without changing gloves
Same deal. No mercy, 1 warning ONLY.
This is why you're supposed to have a lab manager whose only job is to control the environment, keep things clean, regulate who has access to the lab, order equipment and b***h at everyone.
But the fact is, everyone has to do this. Lab managers will fricking love you if you make their job go better and they feel like they are overseeing intelligent people and not a bunch of dumb monkeys.
Sorry, mathchad here, never experienced such amateurism. All brainlets were filtered by calc 1 and vector geometry, we all just gathered round the dining hall with our gigabrains to see who memorized more digits of pi the last hour or so, and proceeded to humiliate lesser beings of the "sciences" and "stem" in general (aka applied mathematics, when done right i.e. by mathematicians)
>everyone takes pipette tips at random, with no clear pattern
I target the OCD gays in my lab and take a random tip from the middle of the box
How do you use the multi canal pipette then?
You use a different line in the box or another box.
This is basic logic.
>How do you use the multi canal pipette then?
It uses very different tips that won't fit our regular tips. Its electronic and you can program changes in the spacing between tips when taking them from the box vs when you use in a 96 or 384 well plate. But I have my own tips cause I'm not an undergrad.
Thats just mean lol
>Fills the hole with a dirty pipette tip
dfsdsfdsf
>boss takes all the caps of the dillution tubes and puts them in a big container(not clean)
>whenever they are taken off they are put into this container
>he then grabs them randomly from the container and puts them back on tubes while vortexing
>consistently confused by his plates not decreasing in density like normal.
I try to explain and he says he's been doing it like this for years.
Using the tip that has the same coordinates as the hole in the plate you're filling is OP. You can't get confused or forget which ones you filled already
> proceedes to roll up her sleeves before putting them inside the laminar hood
This is actually more sanitary than sticking your dirty sleeves in the hood, as long spray your arms down with alcohol. Surely you knew this already and you're not the very noob you despise?
I wear additional sleeves thar cover my forearms and wrists since they can be cleaned with alcohol.
If you're lab coat is dirty you go and wash it. Cleaning your arms with alcohol won't stop falling skin or body hair