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<\/p>\nBiomedical research is a costly business. You don’t really get a visceral understanding of just how costly until you become the principal investigator on a hefty source of funding and start monitoring your own balance sheet. You can easily drop \u00a3300 on a dollop of antibody or \u00a37,000 on a custom siRNA library, but even the day-to-day plastic consumables quickly add up.<\/p>\n
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\nMakeshift kit<\/strong> MacGyver<\/a> would be proud<\/p>\n \nPerhaps because of my frugal upbringing, I have a thrifty streak in me. I despair, for example, that some of my lab mates like to purchase ready-made bovine serum albumin solution instead of making it themselves. For those of you who aren’t biologists, you essentially weigh out some fluffy powder into a beaker, add water, put a small magnetic bar into the beaker and set it tinkling on a stir-plate for five minutes or so until it dissolves: all very therapeutic. As a reference, it would actually take more time and effort to put through a purchase order request for the ready-made stuff. <\/p>\n \nIn this spirit \u2013 with just a few special exceptions<\/a> \u2013 I am always keen to encounter low-cost alternatives. I suspect I am not alone in this. When physicist Rolf Landua was showing me around the antimatter generator at CERN for a piece<\/a> I was writing for LabLit<\/a>, I was almost more amazed by the sheer amount of aluminum foil and gaffer tape in evidence than by the idea of those elusive subatomic particles being created and annihilated not two feet away from me. I love the ingenuity of scientists across the full spectrum, but somehow a solution cobbled together with everyday objects is more wholesome and genuine than the shiniest piece of technical wizardry.<\/p>\n \nSo I took immediate interest the other day when I noticed something very unusual lying next to the microscope in the cell-culture room. If you look at the image above, you can see that the object in question used to be a 384-well screening plate. In its undisturbed configuration, each square plastic well can comfortably grow several thousand living cells, and the plate has a glass bottom suitable for subsequent immunofluorescence microscopy (as in the picture here<\/a>). This pimped-up version, however, as crudely fashioned as a knapped flint, seemed designed to hold a 3-cm tissue culture dish. But who, how and why?<\/p>\n \nThe ‘who’ was easy enough; the initials belonged to our French post-doc, a wily biophysicist who is very clever with his hands. The ‘why’ was clear from what was scrawled on the autoclave tape: it transpires that our big centrifuge has adapters for the screen plates but not for round dishes, and this baby was designed to help spin down cells for quick attachment to the substratum.<\/p>\n \nBut what about the ‘how’? To discover the modus operandi, I had to ask the Frenchman himself. With his trademark cheeky grin, he explained that he had used a hot hammer \u2013 or, as he put it, a ‘ot ‘ammer<\/em>. After dissecting out an 8×8 area of the well matrix, he had superheated the blunt end of the humble DIY tool with the gas burner until it glowed orange, then pressed it into the plate.<\/p>\n \nEt voil\u00e0<\/em>: the lab is saved another few hundred quid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Biomedical research is a costly business. You don’t really get a visceral understanding of just how costly until you become the principal investigator on a hefty source of funding and start monitoring your own balance sheet. You can easily drop … Continue reading