The “Basics”…?

3 February 2022

In complex projects with lots of moving parts it’s always the little details that are overlooked. It wasn’t until the first year of my PhD, 4 or 5 years into scientific training - that I realized my foundational laboratory skills were much worse than they really should be.

My pipetting accuracy - moving small volumes of liquid from one bottle to another - was wildly inconsistent, and I couldn’t trust the data coming out of many experiments because of this. I wasn’t always sure how to calculate concentrations of solvents when making dilutions of drugs or buffers, and wasted a lot of time second-guessing my reagents.

This was by no means the fault of my teachers. Unlike the many students who have studied science courses exclusively online over the past 24 months, I had plenty of access to laboratory equipment and resources - on average 5-10 hours of lab classes every week. The problem was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and therefore never asked the right questions. Because all of these skills were considered “basic”, it was embarrassing to admit any of this to my supervisors. I needed resources that allowed me to brush up on these basic skills in my own time, but back then this knowledge was scattered across textbooks, manuals, and references.

This was the motivation behind BioLab Collective - laboratory training videos that focus on foundational skills in biological science training. This will be an ongoing series where we focus on distinct sets of related lab skills - pipetting and calculations for solutions and dilutions are linked in the videos below.

Feel free to share these resources with your students and/or other instructors - now’s as a good a time as any to brush up on the basics.

Jack.