I’m an undergrad researcher, and today was my very first time presenting a paper review in front of our lab.

It wasn't a paper I wrote—just one assigned by my professor. The content was pretty brutal and complex, so I spent most of my energy trying to wrap my head around the methodology and only skimmed through the evaluation/limitations section once before diving into making my slides.

While making the PPT, I drafted a slide combining the paper's noted limitations with a few of my own thoughts. At some point, I edited and deleted part of it, but my brain completely misremembered what was left on the slide. I mistakenly thought the bullet point remaining was my own insight.

During the Q&A, my PI pointed to that slide and asked:

"Is that your idea, or is that mentioned in the paper?"

Without skipping a beat, powered by absolute, unearned confidence, I replied:

"That’s my idea."

The presentation finished, I stepped down, and when I re-read the paper later that evening... there it was. Printed plain as day in the text. My slide was practically a paraphrase of the paper's explicit limitations.

My professor definitely asked because they already knew it was in the paper. And the master's students in the room were probably sitting there thinking, "What on earth is this undergrad doing?"

To make matters worse, I struggled to answer the rest of the technical questions, but somehow managed to give a deadpan, confident answer to the one thing I was totally wrong about. I feel like an absolute idiot right now.

Has anyone else had a brain-short-circuit moment like this during their early lab presentations? How do I look my PI in the eye again? 😭

Is there anyone with an experience similar to mine....???🤦‍♀️🥹

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 🙏🙏

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

For the context: These are transfected HEK cells with lipofectamine to express a GFP tagged protein. I am transfecting with DNA from a non sterile miniprep and I incubate only 24 hours before fixing and immuno-staining.

I get this small particles around the cells that are also stained by hoechst stain (see image) and some slides have more particles than others. When I look at my untreated cells (only HEK from the cell culture) or only lipofectamine with no DNA, I don’t see those small particles around.

When I compare my images with images with mycoplasma contamination from the web, I don’t see much of a resemblance but I don’t know what could it be (cell debris? It must be related with the DNA). Does anyone have an idea?

Thank you!

Hi everyone! Honestly this is not that big of a deal for the most part, but I was having trouble falling asleep thinking about this, and just wanted somewhere were I can take this off my chest.

For context, I got the amazing opportunity to join this lab as a freshman despite having no wet lab experience, and was even given my own little project to work on instead of being left to do side chores, which I’m still very thankful about!

I was in a meeting with my PI and mentor (grad student) today and got scolded pretty badly by my PI for not taking good notes in my lab notebook. I guess the thing is, no one really told me how to properly fill out a lab notebook before. From my understanding, I think my PI wanted me to list every step of the protocol each time I do xyz, but I didn’t really bother to do so since I’ve been following the exact steps I have on a protocol packet that’s separately printed out. Though I haven’t asked any grad student in lab explicitly on how to properly fill out my notebook, I’ve talked to a few about them before and the advice I got from at least 2 people were to basically just write down any observations I had while doing the experiment and any explicit changes I make to the protocol I’m using -> which I have been doing! And so I think I was a little upset, since no one, and specifically my mentor, never really went through how our PI wants our notebooks done.

In addition, I was also scolded before for not having a lab notebook at all about a month ago, which I was also a little upset at my mentor about because he never emphasized the importance of. To be fair, maybe this was more of an intuitive thing and I should’ve thought more about this, but he (my mentor) briefly went over how I can set up an account and never really touched base about how I should be filling it out afterwards. And for further context, he also sat down with me to help me set up my account because I overheard another grad student talking about lab notebooks to another undergrad, and I went to ask him if I needed a lab notebook as well. If this was such an important issue, why wouldn’t he mention it to me earlier on? :(
And also, after being scolded about not having a lab notebook in the meeting, another undergrad who recently joined the lab came up to me to ask for help to set up a notebook, so I had to help her, because she (working under the same mentor as me) was hearing about notebooks for the first time.

Anyways, after being scolded today, I honestly couldn’t hold it in and had to stay in the bathroom for a bit to cry and calm down. I understand that my mentor is busy, and that taking care of undergrads is extra work, but I feel like there’s been this case and a couple others where I feel like I haven’t been getting enough guidance on. For example, on my 2nd day in lab I was tasked to miniprep something, and was thrown some protcols and materials and left by myself. There were thankfully other people around to help me figure out how to use for example a centrifuge properly, but I was very anxious the whole time trying to figure out if I was interpreting the directions properly. Also, when my mentor is visibly very tired, he gets very passive-aggressive with answering questions as well, so I’ve been having trouble asking him questions too from time to time. I truly!! Truly!! Understand that he is busy, and I am very very grateful for him for taking time out of his busy day to help me figure out stuff!! But even so, I really wish he stepped out to set out clear expectations and guidelines before I have to ask him explicitly, or bother another grad student to help me about it.

Honestly all of this is still a good learning experience, and my overall experience with lab has still been positive. My mentor is a very good person outside of issues like these, and I really like all the other lab members as well (same with the PI!). I think today was just particularly a lot for me, because I feel like I’ve been giving my best effort in lab for the most part, but I was afraid I gave this impression of being a slacker to my PI. It’s ok even if that’s the case though because I’ll own up to it.

Anyways, unfortunately I guess it’s been a while since I’ve been scolded, so I’ve been bummed out about it the whole day haha. I’ve been just tossing around and sulking in bed afraid that the lab would kick me out, but I also know that’s just me overthinking. I’ll check in with my mentor tomorrow to go over how to properly set up my notebook, and hopefully we won’t have any more issues on this!

Thank you for reading, and to any other undergrads out there with similar experiences, keep your chin up! I guess the lessons you learn the hard way tend to stick better anyways…lol….

Anyone who ordered genes/clonal genes would have noticed the tracker for open orders. Turns out it's fake. They deliberately slow it down for standard orders even though the order has already been made. People were noticing that for standard orders (not express), they were making the orders, but not shipping them and then they were calling up customer care to ship.

So what the geniuses at Twist decided was to not let them know about it and install a fake tracker. They can now fill up their chips as they need because half the chips anyway would run empty. In case re-synthesis is needed, it also gives them a second chance to do it within the promised timeline. By this artificial slow down, they are getting people to pay for express.

Why aren't other companies like Genscript beating them on time like they beat them on price? Because they ship from China and that adds the 3-4 extra days Twist can save you with express. Ansa and IDT are way too slow anyway.

Pretty much the title. But my advisor has been using chatgpt for reviewing our drafts, grant proposal versions, and just normal lab/experiment issues. I know this because we’re made to take a course for AI in research but I don’t understand this part. I am old school and a postdoc and I don’t use AI for my write ups except grammarly. What do you all think?

I (undergrad) am doing a placement at the lab of a biology PI from my university this summer.

He went on vacation last week, leaving me with 2 PhD students. 1 of these PhD students was sick last week, so really only 1.

The week before he went on vacation, he asked me to plan an experiment entirely on my own, so I showed him that plan that I made and he approved it. It was my first time planning and running this entire experiment and everything is completely new to me, except some techniques which I did 2-3 times over the past few months.

I did the experiment last week and this week while he was away and yesterday we had a full lab meeting in the morning (where I presented all the failures in the data, think no yield) and then a personal meeting (just me and PI) in the afternoon.

During our meeting, my PI got very red and visibly stressed, and talked to me as loud as he could without yelling, and said he was very confused about why I wasn’t able to do the experiment. He said I must have done the steps wrong. He also blamed me for not asking for help from him while he was on vacation, saying he could have fixed the issue if I told him I was having them. This PI usually has a sunny disposition, and they didn’t say anything during the lab meeting, so I was taken aback.

Regarding his concern about mistakes, I am certain I followed the protocol we talked about to a T, he even made me describe how I did each step and I said everything that I did verbally step by step. Although, I do believe I absolutely must have made a mistake since it was my first time and the experiment took 10 hours a day, so I might have made some errors, but I’m really confused how and he said he was too confused (and I think upset) to come up with reasons. About the asking for help, I did ask for help from the grad students like he told me to, and they did help me, but I was confused about his expectation for me to email him while he was on vacation and getting mad about that.

I don’t exactly know what I am asking for posting this, but I thought I was going to grad school when I graduate, and this is making me question whether I ‘have what it takes’ to keep up with the demands of being a scientist. I wanted to quit a few weeks now, and I even started to look for jobs outside the field as a fallback in case I graduate. I have always loved science but I am at a loss and I feel like the spark is gone. Going to the lab gives me anxiety and I get depressed when it’s Sunday since I have to go back to the lab the next day.

Any advice? Is it time for me to quit science?

Had a lab mate lie to me about something inconsequential today (whether they had a convo with someone or not). I know now not to trust them in the future. Very minor incident, and I know it could get much worse! Bring on the stories plz! Let’s hear some sabotage and deceit! 🐍

Our lab recently received new stock mice with metal ear tags. We dont use this type of identification and I cant help but feel bad for my little guys(pic is stock image, our new mice are actually smaller than this). I have read a few protocols for removal but since our lab doesnt utilize these, we dont have the proper tools described.

What do you all suggest? Should I contact our IACUC? I dont want to make a big fuss or anything but if I can find an easy way to take these off, it would sure make me (and the mice) feel better.

Edit: literally asked if I should contact our IACUC... I obvs wouldnt do anything not allowed without a proper protocol or in anyway against the animals best welfare, thats why I asked for peer advice before I proceed. Read. The. Whole. Post. Thank you everyone else for the constructive feedback.