Life of a Lab Rat

The word alone chills the hearts of experienced cell biologists. And when, a couple of months back, someone upstairs was getting strange results from their cell-based assays, the Boss came to me and asked,
'What do you know about mycoplasma?'. The icy black hand of dread gripped me and I spent the rest of the day trying to find a supplier for a mycoplasma detection kit in Australia.

I spent the next two days arguing with various suppliers and AQIS about what I could or could not import and for how much. It seemed that AQIS were upset about the presence of mycoplasma DNA; in effect the small amount of positive control included in the kits I was looking at.

Finally I found a supplier who had obviously either gone through all this and got the appropriate licence or (cough) just didn't care, and bought a PCR-based detection kit. After a couple of false starts, the Queen managed to get the reaction working, and with far less reagent than the instructions recommended (major bonus; the kit is not cheap). When she's done a few more tests we'll attempt to clone out the positive and internal control products, get the appropriate primers made ourselves (well, by Genosys, actually) and have a home-grown PCR-based mycoplasma detection kit.

Who knows, we might even be able to swell the beer fund, um, I mean raise some cash for doing research, by offering a detection service. Just like the group in another Australian university who never wrote back to me.

By the way, my cells were clean, and so were the other cultures tested. And in case this makes no sense at all to any of you, I was going to link to Wikipedia but the mycoplasma entry is so badly written you should look here instead.