There’s a new kid on the block – in fact, it’s housed in our laboratory, despite being a communal piece of apparatus. Rumors of its arrival buzzed in the institute’s corridors for weeks, and when the inevitable training sessions were organized (by a post-doc whose eyes glowed with evangelical fervor), I avoided the opportunity to enrich myself. In fact, the momentous appearance filled me with a diffuse sense of melancholy.
Why? Because I knew if I tried it, I’d like it; and if I liked it, I’d use it. And if I used it, I might never frequent a darkroom again in my scientific career.
I’ve talked before about new tech and kits, how they can make lab life easier and experiments more reproducible. And if I despise the old-fashioned protocol being supplanted – phenol extractions, say, or old-school cuvette spectrophotometers – I will embrace their modern replacement with enthusiasm. And yet – I’ve also talked about how much I love developing films in darkrooms, and how this ritual has being inextricably linked with all of the memorable moments in my scientific career. So for me, computer imaging of chemiluminescent protein blots was always going to be a tough proposition.
Dear reader, I gave it a go – and it’s amazing. I probably won’t look back. Yes, I’m sad, but on the other hand I’ve got quick, clean results, all tidily scanned and ready for publication. There are a few drawbacks: one person can only develop one blot at a time, so there are bound to be big queues as the technique catches on. Also, it’s a serious pain trying to line up your non-superimposable rainbow markers in greyscale. On balance, however, defection appears to be in order.
So it’s farewell to safelight, Kodak film, X-ray developer, the rumble of the barrel door, the trickling of water, the pungent solutions and, above all, those quirky anonymous interactions with colleagues unseen. I’ve come out into the light.
Do you think it caught your cold?
The age of vampires is over
…or perhaps the Undead (or the otherwise light-averse) will simply have to re-locate to Departments who don’t have the cash for these kinds of fancy Gizmo-trons…
Sorry, Austin. Kit like this is only bought after long consultation. And looking at how much of my grant has gone to X-ray film, I wonder if it won’t pay for itself in the long run. I once went through half a box of film to get a publication-quality exposure, whereas the machine takes continuous exposures and you just choose the one you want. Also, I guess the X-omat machines were expensive too, and are often being repaired.
I suspect that you can feel warm and fuzzy from an environmental point of view, too. X-ray developers do tend to use copious amounts of water, chew through icky chemicals (HCl jumps to mind) and of course there’s all that nasty silver in the photographic emulsion (which, admittedly, can be recycled).
Besides, this is BLUE. And shiny. And new.
It might even be quantitative, though that was the boring bit of the training and I decided to skive off!
Plus it’s easier to get rid of the bands you don’t like the look of!
Nah. I don’t believe that. All films get scanned in and then are just as easy to manipulate, in my opinion. Not that I condone such activity!
Quantitative? Hah, one can be quantitative with an X-ray film and a densitometer. It’s all in the
luck of the drawcare with which you load your dilutions and loading controls. Honestly.Why, when I was a lass we used to quantitate our gels in the middle of the road up hill both ways with a slide ruler and abacus.
Richard W. – Film has nothing like the dynamic range of an image plate or CCD. In the ‘good old days’, when X-ray diffraction data were recorded on film, we stacked 3 pieces of film in the cassette for each exposure to boost the dynamic range recorded.
Mind you, that meant you had to develop and scan 3 pieces of film to process just 1 image. Thank God for modern electronic detectors. On a CCD detector, you can have the data in the computer within seconds!
I’m not sorry to see the film go the way of the dinosaurs.
I suspect that Jenny’s nostalgia for excuses to dally in darkrooms has nothing to do with photography… (I’ve read her book!).
I was just taking naps. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Ohhh!!
What would be nice would be a machine that would do the entire blot for you – it strikes me that WB transfer and staining is supremely automatable. Put your gel on the thingie, close the lid, program the parameters and come back for the eventual result.
I’m sure we could work something out… /goes off to talk to the BlackTower scientists.
Good bye to imperishable stains of the developer on the lab coat
Hmmmm…why were you getting developer solution on your coat, Viktor? Sounds like your o-mat was a bit poorly. Anything leaks, I’m out of there and ringing up the building manager.
I have some idea of how you feel about darkrooms. As a school kid I used to have the run of my father’s photographic studio, a purpose-built professional lab, in the weekends. I’d spend hours in there processing my clumsy efforts.
Interesting that it takes continuous exposures. It must be obvious that I don’t follow developments in this area 🙂 (I’m a computational biologist…) I can recall thinking that was what was needed when I learnt about attempts to digitise gels in the late 80’s. This must have become routine long ago I guess?
You put the ECL solution on the blot inside the machine and it can start taking exposures straight away. You can set it either manually – “expose one time for 30 seconds”, say, or just set it up to snap once every x [unit of time] until further notice. The files are huge but you can then pick the ones you want and delete the rest. The problem with the continuous setting is that it prevents anyone else from using the machine for the duration. Whereas in a darkroom, you can have five people busily making exposures and working around each other to feed the machine, so no one has to wait more than a minute for a result. I can foresee big queues in future – so I’m keeping my film and cassette as a backup.
Be interesting to track the before and after consumption of chocolate, youtube videos, and IMming, since you seem to be trading the immediate sensory and aesthical pleasures of the darkroom for the delayed gratification of good results, faster publication, enhanced career prospects, and less global warming.
Hmmm. Not convinced any of that is conveyed by the new machine compared to the old methodology, on balance.
And I find chocolate boring; I’m more a salty snack kind of girl.
Hi! I love your blog, and I wanted to say that to you.
About the topic, I agree totally. My memories about my previous labs are directly related with the dark room: how small and “oscure” it was, how many people I knew in the room, how many blots were a disaster… it gives a touch of alchemy in a world full of computational tools.
Hi there doctoress, you are mighty interessante, amore! you do try to understndo biochemical bends but how can you manipulate and see and differenciate them? you have got the clinical eye to it this is so awsomly wow it is wowee. I am interested on the part regarding :
!: meeting you!
Chris
AKA: Lisa Simpson+ Nucleo José Reis de Divulgação Científica da ECA-USP …
http://www.eca.usp.br/njr
Ha! It’s Old-Skool 1, Fancy Machine Nil! Swanky blue guy is down with a virus – and the darkroom is positively bustling today.
One for the wish-list: that MT4 wouldn’t strip out the resize code when we insert images. The bloody thing is only supposed to be 400 px wide…
No, but for one embarrassing moment I thought my flash drive had been the source of the infection. As a Mac user, I never even think about it – but turns out it was the other way ’round. Swanky machines seem always to be PC-driven – another vulnerability, obviously.
Wonderful, the authority possessed by a torn piece of paper w/the word “virus” on it. Maybe I’ll make a similar note for my boss so we can ignore him today.
Actually, the most awe-inspiring word on the paper was really ‘Jane’, but that’s another story.