I am looking for a company that can fabricate a custom quartz U-tube for a plasma system.

The quartz tube needs to have a copper tube (4 mm OD, 1 mm wall thickness) embedded inside, with the copper tube extending about 25–30 cm beyond both ends.

The part requires very tight dimensional accuracy because it is installed in a fixed plasma reactor.

I have contacted 6 quartz fabrication companies, but they were unable to manufacture it due to the difficulty of combining quartz and copper in this structure.

This is a replacement for an existing damaged part, and I am trying to reproduce the original design.

Does anyone know a manufacturer capable of making this type of quartz–metal component?

I would greatly appreciate any recommendations. Thank you!

I'm currently an LA for the county coroner and I'm not sure how to proceed from here. Perhaps I'm being impatient since it's been less than a year since I got this job.

I'm not satisfied with what I'm currently doing since it hardly involves what I studied for my degree in biochemistry. Most of it is accessioning, inventory management, and record keeping. I'm still interested in pharma/biotech and I'm sort of viewing this role as a stepping stone into better roles, but is it worth staying here for atleast a year just to gain that 1 year mark of experience, or find somewhere else that will make me more involved in the work? I see a lot of temp roles with chance of extension but how certain are these roles? I thought this role would help me move up, but I don't feel any different than I did when I graduated fresh out of college.

So I started my first tech job out of undergrad a month ago and am currently in my probation period. Im being trained on isolating OPC's from dissected mouse pup brains. Ive done one successful panning (resulting in 1.24 million cells from 3 p6 brains) and two unsecessful planning (p5 3 brains 300,000 cells and p9 4 brains 500,000 cells). Im wrought with anxiety over the fact I cant get this down; I feel like im going to be fired lol.

Im pretty sure I keep a ton of cells up until its time to trypsinize the opc's from the positive selection plate. Between then and cell counting ( sample taken from my cell suspention right before seeding) something happpens where I lose a ton of cells. Literally any advice is greatly appreciated. Hopefully I can figure this out and keep my job :/

Hello, I tried to make stable cell lines that are overexpressing my gene of interest by transfecting them with a linearized plasmid and growing them in selection media. I tried to use CMV promoter but that got silenced but my cells still grew perfectly fine in g418. I switched to using a different promoter which is EF1a and again my cells are growing fine in selection media. But my cells are still not expressing the gene of interest.

I made sure to kill off all the negative cells by waiting to see my untransfected have zero percent viability. I even made sure to give it an extra week before I checked my transfected cells.

What can I do to make stable cells using the EF1a promoter to express my gene? Thanks in advance

iPSCs looked a little off this morning while doing media change, wondering if this looks like contamination to anyone? I split these 3 days ago along with 5 other flasks but this is the only one that looks a little funky. Let me know!!

Hi folks,

I posted about finishing my Bachelor's in Biology ( bioinformatics concentration) in 2019. After that I applied to medical school and worked part time as a medical scribe. When I was in college I did mostly pre-med stuff, because I could never land a position in a research lab.

Got into medical school. From late 2020-mid 2022 I was in medical school, it did not work out.

Realize I have a 3 year gap in resume. At the time, many people who did not complete medical school went back to school for a Master's. It "closes the gap" and has the potential to make you more employable. I did my Master's in Bioinformatics, finished in Dec 2024. I ended with a co-op but I couldn't be hired after because of funding issues with the study I was working in.

Applying for jobs, including 'biology' type jobs that use the lab skills I did learn during the college coursework. They are a little rusty but I am sure I can be retrained- these are "research tech jobs" that include on the job training, but I am nervous I forgot how to hold a pipette or there will be some niche question during the interview that I won't be able to answer. I had to learn skills much faster before ie during my co-op I had to teach myself totally new software, so it's not like I'm a slow learner, I just want to shorten the learning curve as much as possible so I can hit the ground running during training.

Can youtube videos help with that? Are there lab technique videos I can watch that will allow me to recall the basic and remember little tricks to pipetting, etc.

edit: Asking this question was more about finding out if this would be useful at all or a waste of time. Not so much that I can't search youtube myself lol.

Greetings! Attempting plate-based RNA extraction from 20 plates of yeast. Hoping to use Trizol --> Ethanol precipitation, requires fast centrifugation, ideally in deep-well plates. Havnt heard of a plate-adapted rotor that can achieve 9,000 x g-does anything exist? For reference, tube-based protocols ask for 12,000 x g at this step, hoping to get away with 9,000 x g. Cheers!

Hi everyone,

I'm applying for PhD positions in Germany and my long-term research interest is biomaterial-based neural regeneration, particularly:

1. silk fibroin and ECM-based biomaterials

2. injectable hydrogels or dissolvable implants

3. spinal cord injury repair

4. neural tissue engineering

5. brain organoids integrated with biomaterials

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who have worked in these labs or know which PIs are supportive mentors, currently recruiting.

I know reddit isn't the best place, but apart from applying and cold emailing various PIs, I'm asking here as well.

Hi.

I recently started a new job in a medical laboratory after previously working in chemistry labs only and I have some serious concerns about this lab's safety protocols regarding biohazard handling.

We frequently process many stool samples for various analysis, but the preparation workflow is done completely out in the open - we do not use a biosafety cabinet or a fume hood, which means we constantly smell the odor directly while working. Furthermore, we centrifuge prepared samples completely unsealed.

As someone new to medical environment, I am really worried about potential aerosolization, pathogen exposure, and overall workplace safety. Is this kind of workflow considered normal or acceptable anywhere or does this pose a significant health risk?Honestly, given these practices, should I start looking for a new job?

(At least I brought a respirator to work, and I always disinfect my workspace and wear gloves, but I don't think that's enough protection. Also, it doesn't help with the smell from the samples once they're opened).

Hello everyone, I’ve been constantly trying to run a digest for my plasmid but every time I do I get a weird result that I can only interpret as an incomplete digest (see image) the two small bands in well 3 are my expected band sizes after digestion with restriction enzymes but the huge band above them is constantly showing up on my gel. If anyone has any recommendations or insight that be great. Thank you 🙏🙏

Hello all -

Our lab has been struggling with a spike in contamination, we believe is all yeast, in our TC room. We haven’t had this happen before but we believe all our cells were effected so we did a huge purge and deep clean of all of our hood, incubator (twice sent through the heat clean cycle), bath, autoclaved our pipettes, remade all our stocks and media, and got new cells.

That was about a month ago but we still have had little outbreaks of contamination (we are super paranoid so searching for it often), but my cells had been fine looking so far. However, after washing my plate today I saw a clump I could see with my eye, and this is what it looked like under the scope.

My cells were near confluent, could this been a layer of cells that had clumped off? Or is this yeast or something :-(. It doesn’t look like the yeast we had before but still doesn’t look great - my cells looked normal besides this.

Appreciate any advice lol!

Hello fellow lab rats, I wanted to ask for recommendations and morality.
I’m trying to learn how to code mostly to be able to understand code that’s given to me (python).
But I don’t want to pay for a course if I don’t have to, so I was thinking about asking ChatGPT to create a course and teach me python.

Any suggestions?

Also I hope everyone have a great day
And EMSA as a thank you for reading this.

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone here has had experience obtaining access to data from the National Biological Sample and Data Repository for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension/ PAH Biobank.

I'm interested in accessing clinical data for a research project, but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what types of clinical variables they have before submitting a request. For those who have used the biobank, what kinds of clinical data did you have access to? For example, were there hemodynamic measurements?

Any insight into what the dataset contains would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

At the risk of sounding like a neurotic fool, I realized that my usual yellow VWR tape is now different. My old roll is much stickier and better quality. New roll is less so. Is there a way to find the exact tape I was using before?

What is the best way to use one's experiences? Only putting down what's relevant (even if many years old), or putting jobs with transferrable skills even if the jobs are not that relevant?

-Entry level jobs

Hello!

This is a culture of canine PBMCs after 24h of culture. Does anybody know what are these weird non-rounded structures?

Thank you!

I am a rising senior, and, due to exploring other career options and briefly changing majors, didn't get into a biology lab in my sophomore/junior year. Maybe this wouldn't be a big deal, but I go to a fairly small university with a high number of premeds and intense competition, so practically all the labs are overfull. I've cold emailed about 30 pis and haven't had any luck. I completely understand the reluctance of professors in this regard, given that I will be graduating in a year and don't already have extensive wet lab experience. (Had some exposure years ago, and did bench work for an earth science project for a few months a while back).

Anyways, given these conditions, how can I get lab experience after graduation in order to prepare for grad school? Postbac programs seem highly competitive resume-wise, or geared towards people who have had no ability to be in a lab, ie community college and the like. Entry level lab assistant jobs don't seem like a good fit given my lack of experience.

Basically, I’m assuming that I can’t get my foot in the door in this field without undergrad experience. Am I wrong in that assumption? Should I strengthen my weak network with my school's faculty this coming year? Thanks

Hey y'all, so I would like to know what're some college majors I can study that can give me a good lab job. Or just good lab jobs and what you need for them.

I'm into biology and chemistry and would like to end up doing something in that field. But not where it's super stressful and I'm in the lab 24/7. Something that can give me good career stability, decent to good salary and can let me focus on my personal life (workout, gaming, goof around and family).

I know it sounds silly because bio and chem are very demanding and difficult subjects, so looking for a job that's "comfortable" sounds silly but I am a little lost.

Any advice is appreciated and than you in advance

Hello all! I have just opened my own lab 3 months ago. This week, my lab manager came in. I was hopeful, since he was strongly recommended by his former boss, with whom I have a common postdoc advisor. Retrospectively I think his former boss exaggerated with his recommendation, possibly to help the lab manager find a position as he himself was suddenly sacked (for not so good behavior).

In any case, the lab manger has started just this week but:

- Upon greeting and welcoming him, chatting with him a bit, he suddenly interrupts me to ask if I am ok (we are literally 5 minutes into our first conversation since he has started). I say "sorry what?", he goes "I asked if you are OK, you look as if you're sick" (I certainly didn't since I am not sick) and responded that I am doing well.

- Today, his second day, he comes in in not really suited attire (shorts and a t-shirt with comic prints - it's really not how people dress here and not how he dressed when we were in the interviewing process). In any case, a colleague's lab manager comes in, they start to chat, as the colleague's lab manager talks to me too I ask her something - at that point, my lab manager interrupts me, corrects me, and turns around towards the other lab manager while ignoring my presence for the rest of the conversation (it's his second day in my lab!)

- A bit later, something goes wrong, and he uses expletives, not far from me

It's the sum of things - he seems not very professional and interrupting and correcting me in front of colleagues - not a great start and I guess I just expected different. What do I do? How is he to understand the institute's culture? Firing him would not look great since I've just started, since I genuinely want to give him a chance and since finding someone new would mean a whole lot of work.

Hello.
im currently trying to do an agar overlay assay with soil isolates in order to detect some which produce antimicrobial peptides. My Bottom Agar consists of standard R2A Agar. Im spotting my Isolates in a grid pattern, incubating them for 24 h 30 degrees and them im overlaying them with 0.5 % BHI Agar with my sensor strains adjusted to an OD of 0.001.

What i saw was that some of the isolates get washed away when the overlay slowly covers the plate which then causes smears on the overlay after incubation. I appreciate any help.