Shared jobs in the wet lab
In order to share communal equipment and reagents fairly amongst lab members, each person who works in the wet lab is allocated a number of jobs.
These jobs are necessary to ensure the lab runs smoothly.
Our goal is to ensure that jobs are shared equitably and efficiently; please talk to each other and to Edward about any issues.
This page details which jobs each lab member is assigned responsibility for.
Most jobs are allocated to more than one person to ensure that jobs are done if someone is away.
If you are going to be away or cannot do your lab job for any non-emergency reason, please plan ahead and ask someone else to fill in.
Conversely, please be ready to help others when asked, when reasonably possible.
More details on individual jobs are given in the notes, below the table.
| Lab Job |
When? |
Person(s) Responsible |
| Placing Wallace Lab Orders and updating Trello + Slack |
2x weekly |
Liz |
| Placing Communal Lab Orders |
2x weekly |
Liz w/shared labs |
| Liaise with other lab managers in Waddington |
Monthly |
Liz |
| Ordering dry ice from chemistry stores |
Weekly |
Domenico/Marah |
| Receiving and Putting away Communal Lab Orders |
Check daily |
Rachael/Marah/Weronika |
| Receiving and Putting away Wallace Lab Orders, updating Trello |
Check daily |
Weronika/Marah/Rachael |
| Making Communal Lab Buffer Stocks before they run out |
As needed |
Domenico/Rachael |
| Making Competent DH5alpha/Mach1 E.coli cells |
As needed |
Rachael |
| Looking after the desktop Microscope and tablet |
As needed |
Liz |
| Looking after the Fragment Analyzer (Wad 3.18) |
As needed |
Liz/Weronika |
| Looking after the Lightcycler 480 qPCR machine (Wad 3.19) |
As needed |
?/Liz |
| Looking after the OT-2 Robot |
As needed |
Weronika |
| Looking after the Wallace Lab Incubators (Wad 2.19) |
As needed |
Marah/Domenico |
| Looking after the ImageQuant 800 gel imager |
As needed |
Weronika |
| Looking after the PreCellys |
As needed |
Liz |
| Looking after the deNovix DS-11 (nanodrop) |
As needed |
Liz |
| Looking after the Wallace Lab Gel Kit and Powerpack |
As needed |
Everyone |
| Returning our ice boxes and lids to our bays |
Promptly |
Everyone |
| Emptying Autoclave Bags before they get too full for the Autoclave |
Check daily |
Everyone in that area |
| Replacing Envelopes for Sequencing Samples BEFORE they run out |
When low |
Everyone |
| Keeping an eye on stocks of Consumables BEFORE they run out |
Constantly |
Everyone |
| Ordering coffee supplies |
Weekly |
Edward |
Notes
SBS Health and Safety Guidance, again
SBS Health and Safety Wiki
SBS Lab Waste Flow Chart.
Inventory and ordering
“Communal Lab Orders” means those which are shared with other groups in Waddington 2.18.
The schedule of who is ordering is posted next to the hand-wash sinks in 2.18
(schedule is next to hand-wash sink in lab).
If something that you need is missing from the communal cupboard write down on the whiteboard in lab and/or contact the relevant person on the ordering schedule.
The inventory system is described in “where lab stuff belongs” manual page.
The lab tips and tricks manual page has the info on logistics of how to order things.
Everyone is responsible for keeping track of lab stocks of consumables and updating the inventory.
No-one wants to interrupt an experiment because stocks of some reagent or consumable are low.
Plan ahead: if you are planning to run 100 PCR reactions in 2 weeks’ time, check the polymerase stocks and order more now.
If in doubt, talk about it on the #lab channel on slack.
Currently (November 2022) the university is transitioning to the new ordering system People & Money, which is a mess.
Please try to be patient and kind with everyone involved, and expect longer lead times for ordering.
Pipette tips
Pipette tips are ordered communally for Waddington 2.18.
There has been a worldwide shortage of tip supply due to COVID. Hopefully this crisis will be over soon.
Tips are usually ordered pre-stacked when we can, but that hasn’t always been possible.
Refilling tip boxes is good practice, refill what you use generally.
If you use lots of tips and/or you see our boxes stock is short, please refill some boxes and send them for autoclaving.
If in doubt, ask.
Looking after an instrument
This usually involves:
- being familiar with the user manual and its location
- ensuring that the machine is clean and functional
- checking on maintenance requirements
- training new users, including in other research groups
- keeping an eye on use, e.g. users acting erroneously or not cleaning up after themselves.
- communicating about problems
Competent cells
E.coli
If you are only doing a few transformations or using larger plasmids then it is probably better to use bought competent cells of the relevant strain (eg. NEB10B for bigger plasmids, NEB5alpha for small numbers of smaller plasmids, Dam- strains for growing up pML104 or pML107 to clone gRNAs) as it is easier to troubleshoot issues. However, if you need to do lots of transformations that do not rely on high transformation efficiencies then it is worth considering making your own. There are links to protocols in protocols.io in the Wallace lab for Fungal RNA Workspace for making TOP10, DH10B or DH5alpha competent cells and also for making Mach1 competent cells.
S. cerevisiae
If you are doing episomal plasmid transformations into yeast you should consider making frozen competent cells of your yeast strain - again protocols are available in the Wallace lab for Fungal RNA Workspace at protocols.io.
Preparing Communal Lab Buffer Stocks
Important stocks are:
- 50x TAE Buffer (used at 1x concentration for running agarose gels), online protocol, which needs
- 0.5M EDTA, pH8.0 (required for preparing 50x TAE and for a number of other buffers used in the lab)
Protocols for preparing these are also printed out on notices on the blanked-off cupboards above both our Yeast and Cryptococcus lab bays.
Label everything including your name/initials and date
EVERYTHING SHOULD BE LABELED including the date and your name and initials.
If your tube is knocked over people should be able to find you.
If you leave samples in the incubator for a week we need to know who to blame - please try not to do that, by the way!
Everyone in the lab needs to know if that clear liquid is water, buffer, ethanol, or phenol, without opening it.
Biological material should be labeled in a way that we can tell what species it is, absolutely must if it’s BSL 2 materials such as Cryptococcus.
It is acceptable to discard unlabeled materials.
It is also acceptable to send snarky emails about unlabeled materials.
Waste disposal NEEDS UPDATING
Keeping Our Lab Spaces Clean and Tidy and Looking After Equipment
Clean up after yourself so that everyone else can do their work.
DO NOT overfill autoclave waste bags - they should not be filled any more than 2/3 full or they will not fit in the autoclave and have to be emptied again. When a bag is getting full, twist the bag and seal the neck with autoclave tape and then fill in a sticky label with the Room Number, Your Name and the Date(t here are usually some sheets of labels lying beside the hood in our Yeast bay or behind the Vari-X-Linker and you can get more from the media room).
Empty ice-boxes when finished and drain them by the sink but remember to take them away promptly as room at the sinks is limited.
Look after both our own agarose gel kit and the communal lab ones by rinsing them with water when finished, drying off combs and casting dams and putting them back when you are finished.
Lab cleanup
Every 1-2 months we will organize a lab cleanup, in which everyone is expected to participate.
Usually (before COVID-19) we did these jointly with other groups in Wad 2.18/19.
Lab cleanups include:
- incubators
- centrifuge
- fridges
- throwing out old solutions, media, plates
- cleaning the floor
- etc….