9 February 2022

Science and superstition don’t typically mix, but you find a surprising amount of overlap in these ideas when scientists work on cell and tissue culture. In part 2 of our series on cell culture, we will attempt to highlight common mistakes in Tissue Culture that increase the risk of contamination. You will see a series of cell culture scenarios and each of these is flawed for different reasons. You will have a chance to pinpoint the source of experimental error(s), and we have filmed everything from multiple angles for you to have a very close look.

7 February 2022

Cell & Tissue culture is very susceptible to contamination. Each time a sample is contaminated - whether it be plates, tubes, or flasks in your incubator - days (sometimes weeks!) of progress are lost. The margin for error is very small, and because of this new students are very rarely entrusted with Tissue Culture responsibilities. Therein lies the conundrum - how can young scientists develop a skillset that they were never given the opportunity to practice, a chance to fail?

3 February 2022

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. The problem was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and therefore never asked the right questions. 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.

1 February 2022

Virtual online conferencing does not seem to be going away any time soon, and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) need to exploit every possible avenue to disseminate their work. You need to figure out video, audio, and slides for this completely different medium of communication.

31 January 2022

Here we are again. All of us teachers sitting here in the first month of 2022, worrying about the exact same things that we were facing in the early months of 2020, 2021… (and 2023?)

I recently published an article on Times Higher Education: “An educator’s survival guide for online classrooms”, which walks through strategies I’ve used to troubleshoot technological issues in my teaching