Lab equipment that isn't lab equipment
Never let it be said that biologists aren’t resourceful. A few years back, the hilarious Science Twitter conversation #reviewforscience made it into the news. Researchers were sharing their Amazon product reviews for everyday items useful in fieldwork. A recent Science Twitter thread shows how this creative mindset persists - only the focus moved to lab bench work.
If you build it the gel will run
There is something to be said for simple low-cost lab equipment, and even for lab equipment that isn’t actually lab equipment. When I learned how to pour an agarose gel, I ran it using an electrophoresis apparatus built by a postdoc using acrylic panels, solvent glue, cables, and a power supply. Rain-x® car windshield water repellent was useful for casting polyacrylamide DNA sequencing gels. Humble office butterfly clips were useful to clamp glass plates and gel spacers greased at the junctions to cast SDS-PAGE gels. Did my first gel pour leak? Yes, it did. Against all expectations, I became proficient at pouring my own gels and even at altering gel conditions to optimize runs for different proteins. The setups required some finesse, but the experiment results were great.
Science Twitter thread
That’s part of why I loved this terrific Twitter thread among biologists showcasing their lab ingenuity. It was started by Lindzy O’Neal at the University of Washington who asked; “What does your lab use to avoid overpaying for something from a scientific supplier?” From using culinary torches for sealing ampules to replacing a lab water bath with a sous vide, from breaking up cell cultures for membrane preparations with a kitchen blender to using seed mats inside a server cage to avoid incubator derived plate condensation for automated microscopy - every response was a useful fun fact. Below I have shared examples associated with published reports. I can’t confirm how well each replacement works, but I can guarantee a smile. The entire thread with numerous images of setups can be found here. Enjoy!
Fit for flasks
Tired of sampling those flasks of E.coli on shakers? Bring your spectrometer to your culture, rather than the other way around. Try this optical density measuring device for real-time monitoring of your cultures. See Venkata V. B. Yallapragada et al. ODX: A Fitness Tracker-Based Device for Continuous Bacterial Growth Monitoring (2019) Anal. Chem.. Per the authors, “The resulting ODX device is an ultraportable and low-cost device that can be used inside bacterial incubators for real-time monitoring even while shaking is in progress”.
Fixation with flare
As I mentioned Rain X® has made it into research labs before, in DNA sequencing gels, but this scientist took it into the realm of microscopy by using it to fix jelly plankton. See Dorothy G. Mitchell, Allison Edgar & Mark Q. Martindale Improved histological fixation of gelatinous marine invertebrates (2021) Frontiers in Zoology. Lovely imaging of a fragile morphology!
The salad spinner centrifuge
Finally, we come to the fan favorite. Got scaled up DNA purifications to run? Fasten your plate holders and give it a spin! See A Simple and Fast Manual Centrifuge to Spin Solutions in 96-Well PCR Plates (2020) Methods Protoc. 2020.