Life of a Lab Rat

The Queen was using a 4 litre fermentor to express a certain protein. For some reason, she was using an 'enriched' media recipe from a lab down the corridor. Expression failed, and when I looked at the recipe I saw that the final glucose concentration in the media was in the order of 4%.

This is outrageously high in my opinion: I've expressed various proteins from bugs grown in minimal media (M9, for example) at a maximum of 0.3 % glucose, both for selenomethionine and ¹³C/¹⁵N labelling. When trialling those expressions I did the appropriate titrations and discovered that protein expression falls off at or above 0.5% glucose. It's a case where less is definitely more.

This is a 'bookmark' post really. It's part of the reason I wanted to do this weblog, to discuss the serious issues facing scientists with family in the 21st Century. Gosh that sounds pompous, never mind. Point is that I want to flag this as an issue, but don't have time right now to go into it further.

I occasionally read the fora at the Science Advisory Board and these comments caught my eye:

I'm sorry, but if you're not enjoying your work you're in the wrong job.
And yes, I have a wife and two children.

agreed, same here got 2 children as well. The salary is crap so if one does not enjoy doing science I wonder what is the reason to put up with a crap salary and odd working hours.

So, why do we what we do so well?

We were having an interesting discussion at coffee this morning about information, and how bureaucracies like to collect it even if they can't find a use for it. The context was that granting agencies are now asking for the DOIs of published papers. Naturally the topic wandered a little, and someone brought up the idea that all our papers should be engraved on stone tablets because eventually our civilization will progress to the stage that current technology will be lost, and all our research will become inaccessible.

"If the Rosetta Stone had been on floppy we'd never have been able to interpret hieroglyphics" was one memorable argument.