You can also guess what my field is.

Surface expression of CD63 and HLA-DR in circulating eosinophils correlates with improved clinical control after treatment optimization in asthma

Hey all, I’m trying to determine if this is legitimate or if I’m just being stupid. I read this paper and wanted to look at some of the references cited, but I’m having trouble finding a lot of them, particularly the ones where Google Scholar is the only link. In several cases, the author listed seems to be a real person in the field but doesn’t have a paper with that title or a super similar one.

The authors of this paper are in Italy, so maybe the sources were originally in Italian and then got translated poorly? That’s the only explanation I can think of that’s not accusing anyone of citing fake papers…

Is it just me? I normally don’t have any issue with finding papers if I have the first author and the title.

I’m a Laboratory Manager at a small company wanting to negotiate a raise. This is something I haven’t really had to do before. We don’t have formal compensation reviews, just random raises every so often. The director usually handles it all with the owners and I never throw out the number. Recently I’ve been feeling overworked, underpaid, and sometimes not seen for all the work I’ve been putting in. I do love working here and I want to solidify my future at the company. But with where I’m at right now in terms of workload and stress I don’t think I can stay without a raise. I’ve been there for 9 years, 6 full time in a management position. I make 54K with a 5% bonus, health insurance reimbursement, and 15 days of PTO.

What I handle day to day:

• Managing the lab, hiring and training techs
• Inventory management and order processing/fulfillment
• Domestic and international shipping logistics
• Customer service and technical support for dozens of distributors and a few hundred accounts
• Product manufacturing and assembly
• Quality control analysis for nearly all of our products
• Plus a lot of other little things that come with a small business

I know the job market is horrible right now, and they could find someone cheaper. But the whole company runs on two full-time people and plus a few part-time techs. We’re also a very old-school lab. Most things aren’t written down or organized anywhere. It’s been passed on verbally, and a lot of it you only know from being there. Training is a long process and even after training for the first couple years I learned a lot of stuff I was supposed to be doing. If I left, the director would have to absorb a lot of my work until the new hire was there for a couple years. And a lot of the previous managers stayed only 1-2 years and used the position as a stepping stone to professional school. I feel like the director and owners value me and know what I bring to the company. But I’m not sure the owners know the full scope since they don’t see our day-to-day. So I want to be paid for the value I bring, not just for what the bare market rate says.

So here are my questions:

1. What’s a reasonable range for a Lab Manager covering this much scope in the Southeast US?
2. How do you say without really saying if I leave the company would suffer?
3. Besides base salary, what else is worth negotiating? I know they have given profit shares but I don’t know what kind of percentage or if I would want my salary to rely on how much the company is selling when I can’t control that (which is a whole other thing)
4. Has anyone successfully argued for pay above market based on tenure and the effect your absence would have on the company? What did you say?
5. Is it better to let my director advocate for me, or to email the owners directly so my case is in my own words? If I do email, what should it include? 
6. How do I make the case to owners who don’t see the daily workload? I know I can tell them what I do day to day but I don’t want to bombard them with a novel. Part of what makes this hard is that my daily tasks vary a lot. And for over a year it’s included figuring out one crazy issue on top of another. How do you show the value of work that’s mostly unpredictable problem-solving of problems the owners never see … And I’ve proactively taken on a lot of problem-solving and projects that usually wouldn’t be my responsibility, but I saw that things needed to get done if we wanted to keep our heads above water.

Throwaway account, my bf is on here. Hi bf!

I have never felt so much judgement before not being in science mainly my boyfriends friends, colleagues(the worst), and family. I am older and not in science at all, my success is different. I work in hospitality, I own my own house, and I'm in school but I'm older than my classmates, and in some ways behind from everyone else including my bf. My degree is not a "hard" skill. I am always asked what I do around his people and it's like a gut wrenching question to hear... "thats it?" yep, thats it. I don't do research, I'm not in medical, and I don't want to be in science. I work in hospitality, and I love my job.

I had a lot of respect for scientist and research and it genuinely interested me for a while, but I am getting so salty and pessimistic that I don't even want to be around most of these people. I get a long with my boyfriend, the best I've ever with any partner before, but being around these people it's like a sense of elitism and classism radiates off of them.

Are other jobs that aren't science and research not valued by scientist? Are you not interested in it or don't respect it? I am sorry if I come off salty, cause I am lol and I know this isn't all scientist.. but in this bubble I'm in I am super frustrated. I love my boyfriend, I love that he doesn't want to date a scientist also (I get it, used to date my coworkers lol), but at the same time I don't know if I can truly fit into his lifestyle, it seems like constant networking.

Postdoc here. I went to a conference last week, I was presenting work where I wasn't the lead but a collaborator as the real presenter had to cancel.

I toiled for a week to finish the presentation and prepare it. I was feeling fairly confident. However, just before my talk I realised that the fonts, alignment and the quality of slides were absolutely messy in the organisers computer and the PDF would not open. This also happened to a couple of other people in the conference already.

However, this event completely threw me completely off and I absolutely messed up 5 mins of my 12 minutes of talk. According to my supervisor, I still delivered the message and it was good. Maybe they are saying this just to be nice, idk.

However, this was a conference with prominent academicians and pharma company scientists who I would want to collaborate in the future. I cannot stop cringing that I would have completely come across as unprofessional during this presentation.

How do I get over it? Do I need to apologise to my PI as it might have broken their trust?

Hi all! My partner and I recently started trying for a baby, and we were blessed with a series of positive pregnancy tests over the last few days. It’s the first pregnancy for both of us, but we know how touchy the first few weeks can be. Im still a day away from my first missed period. We’re cautiously excited, and obviously not breaking the news to anyone who doesn’t need to know.

My issue is, I work in an organic chemistry lab. Most of our final product is fairly benign (outside of allergies or mild skin irritation), but we work with a lot of solvents and some reprotoxic materials. Knowing this, I told my manager the second I was sure my positive tests weren’t a fluke. I consulted a girl I work with who had a baby a few years back, and she agreed that I should disclose my pregnancy early on. The protocol is to be removed from the lab and perform desk work until after you give birth.

My worry is; did I tell them too soon? If this pregnancy isn’t viable, will I be yo-yoing in my job duties until one sticks?

Anyone who’s dealt with a similar working situation in the past, please let me know what you did. Did I rush into telling work?

I'm looking to order some 6x6 freezer box dividers for some tall cardboard freezer boxes my lab inherited. When did they become SO expensive? Like what do you MEAN it's over $100 for 12? It is literally just scraps of cardboard.

Maybe I'm hallucinating this, but I vividly remember my old lab buying huge bags of standard 9x9 dividers for maybe $100-200. This was around 2019-2021. But I can find no evidence they ever existed.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?? And are we all just buying them in packs of 12 or is there some work-around I don't know about?

...but if any student or professional did that for an assignment, they would be kicked out of grad school/fired and blocked from the industry. When do we get to put him on a PIP for sheer incompetence?

My lab goes through dozens of plates a month, and it is a very expensive purchase. Wondering if anyone has any alternatives they can suggest. We do not care about platform material, just that the pore size is ~0.4 um. TIA!

I’m an RA after masters and has just joined the lab for a little bit more than 6 months. I feel I’ve done nothing, kept trying and troubleshooting to do this one single experiment but nothing works.

We do optogenetics work on zebrafish. So I did spend 2 months picking up all the skills and the essential trainings from the institution (injections, the optogenetics, in vivo work…) then I started picking up pace and feel better doing stuff on my own.

But then, I was told to provide help to finish off a paper that the lab has been trying to publish (along side a postdoc) and it’s essential to the optogenetics work we’re doing.

It’s a wholemount immunostaining of a cytoskeletal protein. From June till now I’ve spent most of my time trying to figure out how to get the results we wanted and I just could not get it. I have troubleshooted many different aspects of the experiments (microscope, reagents, timeframe…) and there’s just too many to change but I just couldn’t get the result we wanted. We knew the protein should be there and unregulated because we’ve seen its direct downstream effect on a cellular level.

I’m still trying to troubleshoot it but I do feel like I’ve not been progressing a lot through this 6 months. My supervisor do want to give me a project of my own but they wanted this to be cracked down before me proceeding to other things.

At the same time, I’ve been helping around other aspects of the lab, some quantifications and analysis of existing data, generating transgenic lines and plasmids, liaising on fish imports and maintenance… but when I compare myself to PhD students or postdoc in the lab, they are also doing some of these apart from their project. I just felt stuck on this one staining that I couldn’t figure out why and how… I felt like I haven’t achieved enough and I’m disappointed in myself…

I’m not sure if it’s imposter syndrome or even how can I quantify my progress or achievement without a solid project of my own that I could tell that’s not a part of some other people’s work…

I guess I just need to rant. Sorry lollll

Posting so more people know what a burn like this looks like on darker skin. I don’t know the concentration of the acid, it wasn’t on the bottle.

How: We were doing a very simple experiment in my Orgo lab today. I had finished the experiment and was getting ready to clean all of my equipment. I had on nitrile gloves, eye protection, an apron, and was wearing a hoodie. I picked up a beaker, and was about to begin washing when I felt a burning sensation on my arm. I have eczema and dry skin + there’s a mosquito problem at my school, so I’m used to feeling random burning sensations that go away pretty quickly. However, since it’s a lab, I pulled down my sleeve to see if it was a burn or something. I saw this white spot on my arm, and weirdly enough the burning sensation wasn’t in that spot, but in an area next to it. It looked like I had glue stuck to me at first, but it wasn’t sticky. I began washing the area, which made the pain worse for a couple seconds, then it stopped but the mark wasn’t going away. I looked at it closer and saw that the top superficial layer of my skin was gone. After 10 minutes, the mark began to bubble up, kinda looking like a mosquito bump, then after an hour it turned into this. When it started to bubble, I took burn precaution and held it under running water for about 15 minutes. I looked for where the entry could’ve been, then I see a purple hole on the cuff of my black hoodie. The acid had burned through my hoodie, and got to my skin. I don’t know how the acid got on the hoodie, there were no spills as far as I know and I wasn’t gesticulating wildly with the beaker either. It’s not a cheap thin hoodie, it’s probably a millimeter or two thick. I was initially upset that I burned my favorite hoodie, but now I think of it as a cool battle scar of my academic pursuits. I took the hoodie off and put on a different one.

After I was done washing, I looked up sulfuric acid burns, and kept scrolling until I saw a picture that looked similar to my arm. The symptoms matched a sulfuric acid burns and that was the only chemical we used today that could’ve caused that burn. Everywhere I read said that the pain of a burn is close to boiling water. I didn’t feel that at all, the pain was just a minor inconvenience that I could have ignored. It did start to look pretty bad after a couple minutes and that’s what makes me think it was the sulfuric acid. Luckily i’m not squeamish because those pics of burns were gruesome.

I know this isn’t correct procedure, but I didn’t tell my instructor because he is a nightmare to deal with and would’ve yelled at me and I just couldn’t deal with that today. He yelled at me earlier in the day for “rolling my eyes”, when I was really just looking at the safety number behind him. A little bit of ironic foreshadowing.

As far as I know, none of my skin on my arm was exposed at any point. The gloves went down to my wrists, where it met my hoodie cuff. The mark feels like normal skin now and doesn’t hurt, even when pressed. I called Poison Control and they said I’m good, only go to the doctor if it gets worse.

We are validating a method to determine CAR-T number via PCR. We spike a defined volume of CAR-T into blood collected in zymo blood tubes and compare with spiking into DNA shield alone to assess recovery efficiency. Extraction is via Zymo kit.

We consistently get a higher yield from blood than buffer (200% recovery). Is anyone able to shed any light on what might be happening?

Changing the kit or blood tubes is not an option unfortunately.

They were icky because they had been treated with an inhibitor overnight so I was expecting this but I got bored and made them more artsy in CANVA

Our lab recently started working with zebrafish, but we’re having trouble with embryo survival.
We usually collect around 100–150 eggs from two females, but 80–90% turn completely white and appear to die by the next day. This happens in both wild-type and inbred strains, making it difficult to conduct experiments.

Here’s our current protocol

Breeding
The evening before egg collection, we place two males and two females in a breeding tank with dividers separating them.
At around 9:00 a.m. the following morning, we remove the dividers to allow the fish to spawn. We then collect the eggs at around 11:00 a.m.

We set up the fish for breeding approximately once every 10 days.

Egg treatment
Bleaching with 0.003% sodium hypochlorite (available chlorine) for 1–2 minutes.
Rinsing once with 0.3× Danieau’s solution after bleaching.
Transferring the eggs to 0.3× Danieau’s solution containing methylene blue.

Danieau’s solution
We prepare a 30× stock solution and dilute it to 0.3× for embryo incubation.
The composition of the 1× solution is:
17.4 mM NaCl
0.21 mM KCl
0.18 mM Ca(NO₃)₂
0.12 mM MgSO₄
1.5 mM HEPES (pH 7.6)

Incubation
Temperature: 26°C (we plan to increase it to 28°C in about two weeks).

Observations
We can see what appears to be cleavage under a microscope around 2–3 hours after fertilization.
However, most embryos turn completely white by the next morning.
We observe similarly high mortality rates in both wild-type and inbred strains.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be related to our breeding setup, bleaching procedure, or incubation conditions?

Any advice on what might be causing this and how to improve embryo survival would be greatly appreciated!

Sorry for the long post, and thanks for taking the time to read it!

Edit: Clarified the timing of spawning and egg collection, and added information about our breeding frequency.

It’s actually gonna kill me

I can’t get this silly meme out of my head so had to create and share it

Those using the StemCell Technologies Easysep Mouse isolation kits via the Easysep magnet blocks:

When you put all of the cells into the magnets and pour off, do you then rinse the old tubes (containing the beads) and re-incubate them in the magnets for a second pour off? (to collect any remaining cells).

And after centrifuging the cells isolated cells, do you do a final incubation in the magnets to remove any potential leftover beads?

The published protocol only does one step, but I wonder how much cells remain after one pour, and how much magnetic beads are uncaught.

Edit; I'm using a negative selection kit. So the cells I want will be unlabeled