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A sign of a new day, or is it the sign that it’s Friday. The bench is clean, media is made: YPD, Cornmeal, and Serum! I love the site of a clean bench in the afternoon. Organization is in the eye of the beholder. Plates are where they need to be! The equipment is there, solutions waiting, with research to be completed on Monday. Some where, I’m sure there’s a poem to be written about all of this.

With a tightening economy, grants fewer and far between, a faster pace, and the ever increasing need for PI’s to publish, I’m extremely excited to be here.  With a constant strain on the world of soft money, any research has to know how valuable it is to have an opportunity to contribute.  If you’re a researcher, we’d love to hear about what you do.  The DC area has a great community out there.  I know it’s waiting to be found.  Drop us a line.  Shoot us a link to a picture of your  bench.  We just might publish it!

We switched gears to look briefly at levels of protein expression. I’m enjoying the change of techniques. It’s been years since I’ve done protein work, and I like it! This time around we’re using HRP and a camera system to detect the signal from ECL. I do have to say, it makes me miss my days with alkaline phosphatase based detection. We have the HRP antibodies already, so that’s the direction we must go! None the less, it’s still quite fun! The anticipation waiting for those bands to appear on the screen.

It’s a day of growth.  Growing cells for RNA extraction for production of cDNA for use on micro arrays.  Freezing down strains for lab maintenance.  A good day.  What’s your day in the lab like today?

So what do you think? Is this a sign? We could be part Neanderthal.. Oh there are so many off color comments to be made.

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.  The biologists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have been slowly reconstructing the genome of Neanderthals, the stocky hunters that dominated Europe until 30,000 years ago, by extracting the fragments of DNA that still exist in their fossil bones. Just last year, when the biologists first announced that they had decoded the Neanderthal genome, they reported no significant evidence of interbreeding.
NYtimes Link

How many of you feel like you develop a science family.  I’m approaching 10 years at the same academic institution, and I feel like my department and previous departments are definitely part of a family.  We know each other and we have a relationship.  If we need to borrow something or talk our way through experiments, your neighbors are there for you.  That’s really a great feeling.  I’m curious if that’s just my institution, of if you’ve run into that too.  Is it a universal academic trend?

It’s a day of making media prepping for tomorrow’s phenotype studies.  Life is wonderful with one sleeve of plates.  I remember the days of my first job in a local contract lab where I had to make 25 to 30 Liters worth of plates along with a great deal of tubes of broth for Antimicrobial Dilution Studies.

How many of you have produced media for a living?  What was your job like?

Yes, that’s the life style of the lab, evaluate your work, and then repeat.  Back to the bench to make more RNA with a few slight revisions to the protocol.  Science is a lifestyle with constant change.  It’s tough, but you keep pushing, and results will come.  We’re still excited by the phase lock gel tubes that we’ve been using.  Cheers to 5′ for a good product.  I am curious though if we can push the limit of the volume of the phenol/chloroform sample.

We would still love to hear some feed back about your experience with research and the out look of the future career paths of DC metro area researchers.  There’s a ton of activity in the area.  Hit us with an email so we can learn more about your experiences finding biotech jobs, plans for the future, or stores about how you got where you are.

Finally.  We tried a few protocols, borrowed one from a functional genomics class using Tri Reagent and Phase Lock Gel Tubes from 5-prime.  Success.  2.5µg/µl of RNA.  Which is great for our needs.

I remember the isolation of a small industrial lab that I worked in long ago.  If there was a product in need, like media, or a chemical, you were out of luck and had to wait for Fisher to ship.  Production could have been delayed.

One of the greatest things about being in an academic environment. If you need to borrow a chemical or something isn’t working, you can knock on a door and compare notes with another researcher.  Add the interactive environment between PI’s, post docs, lab techs, student researchers, and you have a real community that supports a productive research environment.

Thanks to everyone for their help.  We couldn’t have completed today’s research if we didn’t trade a bag of green tea and brow rice for a few 2ml screw cap tubes…

The word of the day is Anoikis.  It’s a form of programmed cell death which is induced by anchorage-dependent cells detaching from the surrounding extracellular matrix (ECM).  What a great word.

After working for the area for some time, we’ve grown curious about how locals find their Bio Tech jobs?  Originally, a friend of ours graduated a year a head of time, and had made her way out to a small lab in Sterling, VA.  She set up an interview for us, and that was the beginning.  After working there for 8 months it was time to expand and get into a position with a greater deal of exposure to molecular biology which lead to a site dedicated to science jobs, which lead to a series of interviews for 3 different positions at Georgetown University.  Since then, for the last 9+ years, it’s been a word of mouth game from discussions with friends of the current PI, to blanket emails from secretary friends.  How did you find your bio tech job in the area?  Was it through the usual on-line resume posts, through friends.  Drop us an email here and tell us your story.