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Oh god we have to have our lab moved at the end of the month, why does this have to be in the 4th quarter  Moving lab buddies 
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Nov 30, 2018 09:43
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Have any ACS members used their Salary Calculator tool, and if so how did your number compare to other online calculators such as at payscale.com?
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Dec 1, 2018 22:06
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teardrop posted:Have any ACS members used their Salary Calculator tool, and if so how did your number compare to other online calculators such as at payscale.com?
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Dec 3, 2018 03:47
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ascii genitals posted:"we don't use guard columns" is the "poo poo, I forgot to even plug it in" of the chromatography world Maybe if you don't clean it. Have you ever had a cast iron meal taste like previous food? I haven't. goodness fucked around with this message at 01:32 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 3, 2018 16:50
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goodness posted:Maybe if you don't clean it. Have you ever had a cast iron meal taste like previous food? I haven't. Good metaphor here. Cleaning a chromatography system's the equivalent of bricking a flat top without heat protection.
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Dec 4, 2018 04:01
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never underestimate the importance of keeping poo poo clean/aliquoted. i simply cannot believe the amount of filth/contamination i see in labs all over the place.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:34
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crabrock posted:never underestimate the importance of keeping poo poo clean/aliquoted. i simply cannot believe the amount of filth/contamination i see in labs all over the place. And perform regular maintenance on your refrigerators and/or freezers! Since I've been at my lab(~1.5y) I've had to help completely de-ice 3 different units, all iced over so completely you can't even see the shelves 
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Dec 4, 2018 18:43
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Honestly I enjoy organizing someone else's cluttered mess of a lab but I could never work in a messy place myself.
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Dec 4, 2018 19:13
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crabrock posted:never underestimate the importance of keeping poo poo clean/aliquoted. i simply cannot believe the amount of filth/contamination i see in labs all over the place. At my last lab job, every communal work space was a tragedy of the commons. The lowlight was the day I came in early to clean, saw ants swarming around the stir plate on the back balance beach, went to go send an all-lab email about "hey, bench is covered in ants," and came back a few minutes later to find that a coworker had measured something out on the ant-covered balance. Because as long as they're on the base, that's cool, right?  (I knew the balance had been used because there was powder everywhere -- probably ground corn samples, given the project my coworker was working on. See also: WHY WE HAD GODDAMN ANTS)
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Dec 4, 2018 19:24
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Antivehicular posted:At my last lab job, every communal work space was a tragedy of the commons. The lowlight was the day I came in early to clean, saw ants swarming around the stir plate on the back balance beach, went to go send an all-lab email about "hey, bench is covered in ants," and came back a few minutes later to find that a coworker had measured something out on the ant-covered balance. Because as long as they're on the base, that's cool, right? If ants showed up on a bench in my GxP lab it would trigger a massive deviation and crisis meetings from upper management. I mean how is that a thing that happens? Are you not regulated or do you not deal with any FDA licensed product? Like wtf. Edit: Like for real, if we have a regulated medical waste container that goes over the fill line it triggers a CAPA. You've got ants swarming over a validated piece of equipment? Lord have mercy. Mourne fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Dec 5, 2018 |
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Dec 5, 2018 00:12
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Mourne posted:If ants showed up on a bench in my GxP lab it would trigger a massive deviation and crisis meetings from upper management. The short answer is that that lab was a shitshow. The long answer is that it was a lab just outgrowing the startup phase, still maintaining a very startup-y "do everything as cheap as possible" mentality, with basically no dedicated maintenance/hygiene staff, old equipment and facilities, and decentralized/disorganized approaches to QA and QC. They may have been an ISO 9001 shop (I never got a clear answer on this) but sure as hell weren't GxP, particularly the food-safety group in which this incident occurred. ... In other words, yeah, a shitshow.
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Dec 5, 2018 00:29
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Mourne posted:If ants showed up on a bench in my GxP lab it would trigger a massive deviation and crisis meetings from upper management. lol my dude have you never been in an academic lab?!
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Dec 5, 2018 00:43
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vivisectvnv posted:lol my dude have you never been in an academic lab?!
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Dec 5, 2018 00:48
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vivisectvnv posted:lol my dude have you never been in an academic lab?! Exact thought I had. We have a nice sticky note on one of our PCR machines: "DON'T INSERT USB DRIVE INTO MACHINE WHILE RUNNING. IT WILL FREEZE UP COMPLETELY."  Fake edit: anyone use an Agilent BioAnalyzer 2100 to measure RIN values? We're trying to figure ours out but, uh, well... 
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Dec 5, 2018 01:25
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Johnny Truant posted:Fake edit: anyone use an Agilent BioAnalyzer 2100 to measure RIN values? We're trying to figure ours out but, uh, well... what's the issue?
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Dec 5, 2018 01:35
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Antivehicular posted:At my last lab job, every communal work space was a tragedy of the commons. The lowlight was the day I came in early to clean, saw ants swarming around the stir plate on the back balance beach, went to go send an all-lab email about "hey, bench is covered in ants," and came back a few minutes later to find that a coworker had measured something out on the ant-covered balance. Because as long as they're on the base, that's cool, right? poo poo dude I thought we were bad with keeping 2-3 generations worth of obsolete equipment in every storage space.
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Dec 5, 2018 02:05
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Mourne posted:If ants showed up on a bench in my GxP lab it would trigger a massive deviation and crisis meetings from upper management. You're lucky. I did have ants show up in my gmp/glp lab at a pharma manufacturing building. Facilities delivered windex to us to spray the trails with, and a couple days later orkin showed up on their routine day and did something. They came back 3 times after that. Now I will say had they shown up in an actual clean room all hell would have broke loose.
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Dec 5, 2018 03:37
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Mustached Demon posted:poo poo dude I thought we were bad with keeping 2-3 generations worth of obsolete equipment in every storage space. Likewise, a Q200 TA DSC will last longer than any modern day equipment.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:05
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Dik Hz posted:Some of the older poo poo runs better than modern equipment. You ever see a Varian 300 series HPLC fail? I swear the reason Varian went out of bussness and got bought out was because they could never sell to the same lab twice because their equipment lasted longer than the average prof's tenure. Hmm true. We only got rid of some equipment because the software stopped working with mandatory pc upgrades.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:20
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Mustached Demon posted:Hmm true. We only got rid of some equipment because the software stopped working with mandatory pc upgrades. Also I have an old TGA that runs great with Windows 3.1 and 3.5" floppies. I think my IT dude had an aneurysm when I showed him the PC and instrument.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:23
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Mustached Demon posted:poo poo dude I thought we were bad with keeping 2-3 generations worth of obsolete equipment in every storage space. Well, obviously your boss isn’t a hoarder of old equipment like mine. Ask me about VR googles from the 90s.
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Dec 5, 2018 06:37
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Dik Hz posted:Some of the older poo poo runs better than modern equipment. You ever see a Varian 300 series HPLC fail? I swear the reason Varian went out of bussness and got bought out was because they could never sell to the same lab twice because their equipment lasted longer than the average prof's tenure. I used a Varian Inova 300 MHz NMR when i was in school from 1993 when i was in school in 2010. it wasn't until the year after i left grad school that it started to break down.
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Dec 5, 2018 15:41
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Development posted:what's the issue? We're having a few, and we're unsure where in our protocol we're flubbing up. So my main questions are: 1) How the gently caress do you clean the electrodes? The protocol and program's help manual both say "pipette 350uL of RNAseZap into one well" but... there's sixteen wells in each chip?  It gives the following instructions afterwards with RNA-free water, except it says to pipette it in "a different well." Does this mean the microchannels in the chip allow enough flow of the liquid to clean all of the electrodes?2) How accurate is the program's measurement of RNA concentration? Our spectrophotometer gave us one concentration, but then the program gives us a drastically different one. I'm talking 17ng/uL from the spectro, and 77 ng/uL from the BioAnalyzer program. 3) We have gotten a few RIN values from the two times we ran it; the first run was very poor numbers(~3.2) on some of the wells with our sample, and then some wells with N/A as the result. The second time we got N/As for every well that contained RNA, then a 2.7 on one of the wells that contained no sample. We checked the error log and did receive errors for the second run, and it mentioned possibly adjusting values after the experiment, is this commonly how it's done? I kind of shadowed the tech who used to do all of the RIN value jazz in our lab, but that was ~9 months ago, and I admittedly did not take very good notes, and cannot remember most of the little tips and tricks she taught me. We're fairly sure it's not the RNA isolation protocol that we're messing up on, as one of the techs I'm learning this with does that on a semi-regular basis, but I'm not ruling it out yet. It may also just be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, as there are three of us trying to learn this protocol simultaneously 
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Dec 5, 2018 16:16
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Shrieking Muppet posted:I used a Varian Inova 300 MHz NMR when i was in school from 1993 when i was in school in 2010. it wasn't until the year after i left grad school that it started to break down. Console or magnet? The latter is as it should be, I know a bunch of NMR spectrometers that have been running without quenching since the middle of the 90s. Consoles is another thing though, although if you don’t push the system I guess it could last a long time. The abortion that is Vnmr is another thing though.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:46
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Anyone know where I can find info on some good pharma gmp conferences to go to this next year? Google searching just pulls up promotional reviews by the same company that hosts them.
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Dec 5, 2018 17:51
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Cardiac posted:Console or magnet? Both, magnet had the seals go bad in 2000 but after that all as well. For 90s software it wasn't that bad to use however when i started working and go to try topspin 2.1 holy gently caress the quality of life was better.
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Dec 6, 2018 04:09
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goodness posted:Maybe if you don't clean it. Have you ever had a cast iron meal taste like previous food? I haven't. Actually in the case of cast iron it is more of an example of the good passivation that occurs in a well used, well maintained instrument. I suppose a better analogy would be heating up a fish in a plastic Tupperware dish every day and then using the same Tupperware to store donuts  .There are just so many reasons to either dedicate an instrument to an application, or at least have spare capacity in case an instrument goes down. I wouldn't want to run residual solvents on the same GC that is used to do a pesticide analysis.
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Dec 6, 2018 12:04
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i left my lab notebook in the animal surgery room too long and now it smells like rat piss
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Dec 6, 2018 20:28
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Shrieking Muppet posted:Both, magnet had the seals go bad in 2000 but after that all as well. For 90s software it wasn't that bad to use however when i started working and go to try topspin 2.1 holy gently caress the quality of life was better. The version prior to topspin (xwinnmr?) was pretty horrible though. Also for some reason, whenever I try to run on a 900/950, the fucker quenches and hello a couple of months downtime. Ever since Bruker got a defacto monopoly on the spectrometer business (unless you count JEOL), the speed in doing repairs have gone down. Also, for some reason VNMRJ is now open source if you really want your Varian fix.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:04
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I work in a lab with one other guy, the owner, who is also a not really trained but kinda chemist, and we do analyses of beers, wines, other alcoholic beverages, fruit juices and even fruits sometimes. The boss likes to prep samples and leave stuff lying around to rot, and works over the weekend, so when I come in on Monday I usually spend an hour cleaning up his mess, and often some more time during the week. My insistence on keeping the lab clean is probably the only reason we haven't had a bug infestation or something else.
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Dec 7, 2018 20:44
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Cardiac posted:The version prior to topspin (xwinnmr?) was pretty horrible though. Last time I talked to a service guy they cant find enough guys to do the work since they are the only business in town. Then again we cant get waters in to service HPLCs fast enough so maybe its everything is slow.
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Dec 7, 2018 23:23
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Johnny Truant posted:We're having a few, and we're unsure where in our protocol we're flubbing up. So my main questions are: The reagent kits should come with blank cleaning chips made of clear plastic. They look like the normal chips, but have one big reservoir connecting all of the wells. We have different cleaning chips that we use for RNase ZAP and for water. If a the electrodes sit in a chip with gel/sample overnight we’ll clean as described, then scrub the electrodes with a stiff bristled toothbrush, then repeat the cleaning. quote:2) How accurate is the program's measurement of RNA concentration? Our spectrophotometer gave us one concentration, but then the program gives us a drastically different one. I'm talking 17ng/uL from the spectro, and 77 ng/uL from the BioAnalyzer program. Not very. My order of trust is dye-based (eg Qubit) > spec > gel based quant. quote:
How do your traces look, do they look as expected? Sometimes if you overload a well it can gently caress with all of the subsequent wells. Also, I’ve had issues with RIN failures when the ladder didn’t run well, which seems to be my most common issue. We immediately aliquot out the ladder into 2 ul aliquots In PCR tubes and store at -80C to avoid freeze thaws. In a few cases it will mis-assign one of the markers, and I’ll have to go in and manually reassign. Also, for whatever reason, compared to other reagents the expiration dates seem to actually mean something. I’ve had issues with expired kits. EPICAC fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Dec 9, 2018 |
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Dec 9, 2018 23:36
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https://twitter.com/patschloss/status/1072981856834990080?s=12
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Dec 13, 2018 16:36
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Facilities folks, if any are here: How would you handle this scenario? Equipment range of temperature controls in a lab zone: 5*C to 50*C. (Functional range the equipment can support) Equipment Calibration Tolerances: +/- 1*C. Current Alarm Limits: 13*C-25*C (What triggers an alarm that we're outside temp range) Target Temp: 20*C. (qBAS targets this for the area) Material Temp Storage Controls: <=25*C. (Acceptable temp limits for our stuff) From a compliance perspective, I see this as a poorly-chosen alarm limit. I think that the alarm limit to technically be at 24*C, not 25*C, because right now I don't know that I'm not actually seeing 26*C when I get a lab temperature ping at 25*C (+/- 1*C). That or we need to create a risk assessment / temp-excursion study to show that an hour or two at 26*C doesn't instantly cause all our stuff to turn to poison (it doesn't; gotta love compliance poo poo). Any alternative suggestions on addressing this that might save me a two-year lookback period given our instrumentation group just now realized their calibration limits were nebulous?
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Dec 13, 2018 19:35
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Hey lab people, can you give me some career advice? I just finished up two years working in a DOE lab (had to leave; my contract expired). I finished with a bunch of coauthored pubs and glowing recommendations. Since then I haven't been able to find anything in my field. My last job was in bioplastics / renewables. I have an M.S. in materials science and a B.Sc. in chemistry. I'm not really sure where to go next, can anybody help me?
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Dec 13, 2018 21:10
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For those working in a lab, do you have compsci/programming related stuff that a CS/chem intern would be suited for. I've made the switch from chem to CS but still want to do science stuff. I need ideas what to offer/look for as I try to find placement for the coming summer in this weird limbo I'm in
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Dec 13, 2018 21:32
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girl pants posted:Hey lab people, can you give me some career advice?
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Dec 14, 2018 01:54
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Dik Hz posted:What do you want to do? Also, what region are you in, and are you willing to relocate? I'm in Southern Ontario. I would like to keep working in my field (bioplastics), and I know there's a big business development centre for that in Guelph (which is in Southern Ontario if you're not super familiar with the location of every small town in Canada), but I'm not sure how to approach it. I don't have a Ph.D, just an M.S. I'm open to considering careers that are not that since I know it's not exactly a huge field. I'd like to stay in Canada if possible but I'd relocate anywhere within Canada.
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Dec 14, 2018 03:14
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girl pants posted:I'm in Southern Ontario.
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Dec 14, 2018 03:24
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Dik Hz posted:I've worked with the University of Pickering a couple times doing MatSci type stuff. Regular acrylic plastics though and not bioplastics. Have you looked in that area? Didn't even know there was a University of Pickering. I've just been looking on Indeed and I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of stuff!
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Dec 14, 2018 03:30
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