Doing the periodic cleaning of used plasmid miniprep columns and realized in honor of Earth Day it may be worth reminding you molecular biologists:
Plasmid miniprep columns can be cleaned and reused essentially indefinitely! Just add 1 M HCl, soak overnight and wash 3x w/ water. Save $ and plastic
Hello little friend.
You need to align all of the figures in your thesis, and you need write to potential postdoc mentors.
I think the second is more important.
Knowing you are working on something that is more important than the things you are not working on, may help you feel more in control.
Some things are clearly more important. Giving a number to importance and to urgency is a good exercise to help you decide.
You don't have any clean socks but you haven't filed your taxes yet. Both are urgent one is way more important.
Ah then, here’s my prioritization strategy. Write out everything you need to do give it an importance and an urgency.
Then I ignore the urgency value. Prioritize on importance only.Turns out I’m very bad at distinguishing urgency from importance without this exercise.
That being said this is a really tough time to be leaving the relative comfort of a PhD program so give yourself some grace if it’s fear of leaving that’s the obstacl.
For thesis writing, I had writing time. 7-9 pm computer had to be open and I could do anything except watch TV or surf the internet. sometimes I couldn’t write so I’d clean or organize my apt, eventually all those procrastination tasks were done and it also got easier to write.
Or what about, the work exploring this one factor in this one pathway (AP1-mediated traffic) will yield conceptual and technical advances, but the proposal doesn't address if different pathways using completely different proteins (AP2/3/4 mediated traffic)might have an analogous mechanism.
Working on a grant rebuttal, how do you rebut a review that says on one hand that compelling preliminary data support *specific* hypothesis, but that a major score driving weakness is that the claims of *specific* hypothesis exceed strength of the evidence?
Many of us have actually lost the struggle already. My lab is closing in June, and I'm not the only one. By far.
Two male slate-coloured juncos face each other in mid-flight, clasping feet like dancers as light snowflakes flutter around them in the snowy forest.
Two male slate coloured juncos hover facing each other in mid flight. The one on the left pulls his wings into an upstroke while bracing his tail, staring into the eyes on the one of the right who is mid-downstroke. Snow flutters around them in the snowy forest.
Some mid-air junco battles from the other day. They do these amazing, spiraling aerial battles. It's taken some practice to be quick enough to catch them. Most of my shots are of empty sky :) #birds 🌿
A tortie cat in the sun of golden hour. She looks pensively directly at the camera.
Yeah, me too. But this was someone in a structure lab, so I kind of thought they would know best---but after sending them a link from iprotocols about potential for variable expression due to recombination--tech was like 'Oh that explains some things!'.
In my experience, for some proteins, expression from frozen transformed BL21(DE3) stocks is highly variable. Less so with fresh transformants. So I just got in the habit of using fresh transformants cuz
Mosquito bits will take care of them.
I may have freaked out the tech in a new PIs lab with my facial response to them offering me glycerol stocks of a pET-plasmid with an insert already in BL21-DE3-pLysS.
I opted for doing the transformation myself.
Did anyone else learn that you have to do expression transformations fresh if you want them to work?
Is this still a thing?
We have a nice new garbage can with a lid that we can’t use anymore because our town gave us another new garbage can that we have to use instead. So what does one do with a nice big garbage can?
Thinking about this more, the 2 and 3 year bans are real career killers… who’d hire a tenure track candidate, or an (associate) professor that has one of those hanging around their necks?
Are you sure you didn’t marry a cat?
plz repost 🙏 we are looking for a technician to start this summer/fall for 1-2 years to work with me at Cornell in the labs of @cedricfeschotte.bsky.social and Andy Clark, in collaboration with @corriemoreau.bsky.social on flies & termites 🪰🐜🧬🔬 Ithaca is gorges!
jobs.hr.cornell.edu/us/en/job/WD...
Yup, more than conjunction junction or I’m just a bill, beans and rice is the one I find myself mumbling at inappropriate times.
Another fantastic #GolgiTime paper from the Glick lab!
@joachimgoedhart.bsky.social & #microscopy friends, we're using ymScarlet-i3. It's the best general purpose red FP we've tried in budding yeast. But in our hands it photobleaches really fast when exposed relatively low-intensity *488 nm* laser light (~20 W/cm^2). Have you seen this? Thoughts?
The image shows a section of a zebrafish gut, consisting of finger-like villi that extend into the lumen. In this image, each villus has large blue cells filled with mucus (shudders involuntarily), as well as basal cells that stain intensely for the PCNA proliferation marker.
We did it!! Our first IHC in Bath!!! Cora captured this gorgeous image of Alcian blue+ goblet cells, as well as PCNA+ epithelial cells in an adult gut. We still have fine-tuning to do, but these beautiful/simple views of such a complex structure will always make me smile.
Twenty years ago, thanks to the CNRS’ ATIP programme (www.insb.cnrs.fr/fr/atip-avenir), I had the opportunity to embark on this wonderful human and scientific adventure. Thank you to all my colleagues and to the funding agencies for making this possible.
I'm looking for #NewPIs (<3 years as lab heads) in the gene regulation/functional genomics space. If you are one or know one, please comment below! 🧪
WTF
Map of approximate tornado path in Ann Arbor at ~1:45am on April 15, 2026
Description of 4/15 EF-1 tornado from National Weather Service
NWS confirmed that an EF-1 tornado touched down near Maple Village and lifted near 4th and William in Ann Arbor at 1:45am on 4/15/26. Thank goodness it lifted or it would have gone right through downtown/central campus!!
Happy Birthday!
I didn't have much more than soreness for either the first or second-I even scheduled mine for Fridays so I wouldn't be wiped out on a workday.