Laboratory Blunders

It’s refreshing to know that, regardless of how much experience or training we undergo, we remain human and still make stupid mistakes. I’m not just talking about fighting with laboratory equipment which hinders experiments or doing too many things at once to the point where you forget what is going on, but the type of mistake that is so rudimentary that you can’t help but slap your forehead and roll your eyes. At points in my scientific training career, I will admit to being the poster-girl for stupid laboratory mistakes…you know, things like forgetting to, err, add DNA to your transformation, and then standing around confused as to why the agarose gel does not look as expected (me? do something like that? never!). This time, however, the error fell in the hands of my PI and Assistant PI and, like I said, it’s nice to know that even my superiors are still error-prone at times (particularly since I am sure that in my next way-too-many years, I will make similar easily-avoidable mistakes, and I know that my PI can just sit back and smirk but know that he has been in similar situations).

To make a long story short, the assay detects hydrolysis by looking at the amount of free phosphate. My PI had the idea that the protein may be more reactive if dialyzed into a different buffer solution, and discussed this with the Assistant PI, who is apparently the protein-master of the lab. Ultimately, they decided to do the overnight dialysis into PBS… otherwise known as phosphate buffered saline. That’s right, phosphate. This didn’t dawn on my PI until the colorimetric detection agent was added, and instead of a barely-detectible-by-human-eye color change, the solution in the well-plate turned instantly dark green. After a few moments of looking confused, suddenly it hit – in his case, with a response of “Oh, DUH! What were we thinking?!” Yes, the laboratory lesson of the week was, in the event of attempting to detect hydrolysis of ATP by measuring the release of phosphate, it just might not be a good idea to use a phosphate buffer! Luckily, this problem was easy to fix within 24 hours by dialyzing other fractions in a non-phosphate containing buffer, but it still provided a bit of humor throughout the lab for the rest of the week.

In other news, it has been a weekend of studying, as the biomedical graduate students are facing our first exam of the semester tomorrow. I’ve been remaining so hopeful for a snow day tomorrow which would push the exam back to Wednesday, giving me two whole extra days to study and therefore somewhat of a chance to pass. We did get about 8” of snow and knowing how inept D.C. is at dealing with snow, I thought for sure we would at least get one day off, although things seem to be clearing up well, particularly for a city which goes into panic-mode with just a few flurries. The majority of school districts in the area have already closed for tomorrow, or at least declared a two hour delay, so I’m still keeping my fingers crossed for two hours… that’s all I need! Just a two hour delay – I’m willing to go into lab and class for the rest of the day… is it really too much to ask for just two hours off? Or even a declaration of “any exams cruelly scheduled for 7:30am despite the fact that the course meets at 9, in order to allow enough time for completion of the exam, are hereby postponed until Wednesday.” In the meantime, it’s back to studying the nine bazillion different types of collagen… and checking the snow cancellations every fifteen minutes.