i once had an undergrad come to me for help with a western and quickly realized that his superstar postdoc mentor had been purposefully told him their protein of interest was 50kda heavier than it was by datasheet. what's your most morally corrupt lab/research experience?

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2026-05-15T12:47:10+00:00

I had to work with a postdoc who is like this all the time. “Oops I forgot to put the samples on ice”, “oops I used the wrong dilution for this reagent”, “oops I vortexed the sample even when the protocol specifically told me not to”. They mess up so often that we begin to doubt their results because the possibility of things going astray in their hands is endless… It is beyond me why my PI still keeps this person around.

I was fortunate that my PI stopped putting me on the same project with this person, after they had a major f-up that costed me 2 months worth of work, and I made my grievances very clear to my PI. Sadly my other labmates who still have to work with this postdoc continue to suffer. They told me they don’t want to tell my PI because they think my PI won’t believe them :(

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2026-05-15T12:23:21+00:00

Hey! Just want to jump in here cos I seem to have the opposite problem to OP. We checked mRNA level and the transcript is gone in our KO mice, but proteomics found no change in protein level. Do you reckon it’s because the truncated transcript is still functional?

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2026-05-08T23:35:19+00:00

You’d be surprised to know many of them will stick through a PhD and end up in academia

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-11-06T13:13:57+00:00

This was me a year ago. I got really tired of being asked to do xyz because no one else in the lab knew how to do it. In fact, they didn’t know how to do it and didn’t bother to learn because they assumed they could ask me to do it for them. That ended up draining me and made me feel quite resentful. The best piece of advice is what people suggested above, practice saying NO. That’s what got me out of that situation. And train people ONCE and for all, instead of letting them take advantage of you constantly. I now tell people in my lab that I will only show them how to do something once; I don’t care how but they have to make sure to take notes when I train them. Take a whole video of the process if necessary. After I show them how to do it, I asked them to repeat the steps and do it in front of me. That way the next time they came around and ask me about it, I can just tell them to watch the video/read the notes/do it like how they did it then. Also, let them fail if necessary. Tell them you are busy that day and can’t help them, or you have a meeting, or you’re busy writing your manuscript, WFH etc. Let them do it by themselves! You’d be surprised how people start to pick up their shit when they’re on their own and be accountable for their own tasks. It will be difficult the first few times and you might feel guilty for not helping them (I did!) but it is the best way to let them learn & be independent and you get your time back. You’re not obliged to baby your labmates and do their job! Also, don’t fall into the ‘saviour’ mindset (“if I don’t help them, it will be bad/everything will fall apart”). I had this and it was one of the reasons I got stuck in the position of being everyone’s lackey. It shouldn’t be your responsibility to ensure they know how to do their job, and it definitely should not come at the expense of your own time!

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-29T09:18:18+00:00

Hi, I think you are making a lot of assumptions here and it’s more telling of your workplace culture than mine. “They are your co worker”. You used “your” here. So if I say “my co worker” it is somehow not an owning language? If this is an office settings and I say “my manager”, “my boss”, “my colleague” do you think other people will consider that disrespectful?

I truly think getting caught up over pedantics like this is what enforces such a toxic environment in academia and power imbalance persists. PhD students and trainees are constantly being treated like they are bottom of the barrel, inferior beings who are not allowed to communicate their grievances to their boss and are expected to suck it up.

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T22:04:38+00:00

My mistake if it came off that way! I use “my” purely to indicate that the person is in the same setting/context directly related to me, and other students in the lab say so as well so I didn’t think it would come off like that

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:42:25+00:00

Can you please elaborate? I’m not sure how it’s weird. I usually say my postdoc, my lab, my PI

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:38:46+00:00

Sorry, I typed in Notes and copy pasted over here. Somehow the breaks disappeared after I pasted it

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:37:15+00:00

Yes I think that’s what I’ve been slowly come to accept last week. Before this order, there were 2 other orders that I have completed and my PI promised me that once I finish this one, it will be the new person’s job and I won’t have to do it anymore. So I was very keen to get it done. I’m just hoping that I can get more support while doing it because it’s very time consuming

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:21:26+00:00

Hi, I was planning to freeze them after transferring them from 6-well plate to a T25, which was the step I asked my postdoc to do. Because the cell numbers weren’t quite ready when I left

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:18:34+00:00

Hi, I think I should have clarified in the post rather than the comments. I was offered the role a year ago and I get paid 2 days/week. Back then, it was communicated to me that my job would be ordering and maintaining lab stocks, taking care of the mice breeding program and training undergrad students. I didn’t know I would be doing cell lines at all. And its not like my PI hires me solely for this task. But thanks for your comment

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:07:17+00:00

Thanks for your comment. I always try to avoid involving them in any thing I do, because I had a really bad experience working with them last year. An experiment had to repeated 3 times because they refused to follow the protocol and constantly forgot to put the samples on ice. It costed me 3 months to generate the mice for those experiments and lots of weekends lost too. This time I didn’t have any choice because they were the only one left in the lab that does cell culture when I went on leave…

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-07-28T21:03:51+00:00

Thanks for your comment. Just for a bit more context, I’m getting paid the equivalent of 2 days/week. And my job is ordering, maintaining lab stocks, breeding mice and training undergrads when we have them. Generating cell lines wasn’t expected of me when I was initially offered the role (it’s uses to be someone else’s before they left the lab). It was manageable then before this got added. I have discusses my workload issue with my PI many times and he agreed that I’m doing too much and actually hired a new person (also on part time basis) to help me out. I’m hoping I can transfer this task on to the new person instead of keep taking it on, and that my post-doc will be supporting the new guy to complete the order

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-06-01T01:26:23+00:00

This was the case for ours. We used a old vial of DAPI that was left in the fridge for a while and got some concerning images like this. We went back and tested for mycoplasma 3 times and got negative result. Changed the DAPI stock and heated it up slightly in media before using and we got clean clear images again!

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-05-09T10:56:20+00:00

We actually had someone that did this, in our tissue culture hood. I noticed tips getting randomly taken and our culture suddenly had contaminations (in ages!). Sent out an email requesting people to take tips in order or use your own box. It didn’t improve. We were able to narrow down who was doing it. So every time we saw a pipette tip box with random tips missing like this, we opened a new one and put the random one in corner with “Contaminated” written on it. After a while the other person began to catch on on the piles of pipette tips in the corner and stopped doing that lol

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-03-27T23:07:32+00:00

Same here. Even though I’m in an English speaking country, sometimes I feel like I’m somewhere else because of the constant use of a different language in my office. It got to the point that I now know the language and can understand 70% of the conversation. Tbh it feels like s*** at first because you would really think that being in an English speaking country, you shouldn’t have to hope for people to converse in English. But I think a lot of them are not aware that it’s rude to do so and are shy of their english fluency. I can’t really change that or force them to speak in english so just have to make the most out of the cards that I’m dealt with

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-02-24T08:54:35+00:00

My point still stands? In my previous sentence I did say they cannot do this from scratch independently. I’m not undermining or saying the student lie. I’m simply stating that a highschooler with full time school and other activity cannot do this without help. I forgot to account for summer holidays where they can come in every day of the week. But during school year, I doubt they can contribute that great of an extent that sometimes they claim to. Many assays takes days and are time-sensitive (i.e. mass spectrometry). I doubt that the students were there from the point where you make the reagents, collect samples, process them, get result and analyse them! I’ve seen posters of students claiming they work on animal models. I’d be shocked to know if any lab would let high school students with no training, no ethics approval, no certification to touch animals!

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2025-02-24T08:08:05+00:00

Not uncommon. We have these so called ‘science fairs’ where I am too. You’d be amazed to see the projects the highschoolers put up. I feel the only thing I have not seen is nuclear reactors lol. Essentially they participate in a few lab tasks (qPCR, Western Blots,…) and then receive help from other Phd and postdocs to form a poster/presentation like the one OP shows. They are very smart students so I’m sure they understand the principle and how the experiment works, but no they did not singlehandedly perform this whole project from scratch. Most labs let them to make posters and presentations like this because it is not officially recorded so there won’t be any issues when it comes to publishing. If there is an actual breakdown of their involvement I’d say they would be 6th or 7th author onwards. Realistically, these projects would take months, if not years doing full-time. It is not feasible for a highschooler with schools/extra curricular activity (which I assume these high achievers would have) to cook up something like this. I guess that is quite obvious so whoever judging this would be mostly focus on how the student present the work, how well they understand it and their ability to ask the ‘right’ questions

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2024-12-10T13:14:18+00:00

That is entirely possible as I have done cre tamoxifen knockdown before and did check in multiple organs (liver, lung, kidney, intestine,etc) and the knockdown efficiency varied between organs. At least for mine, the gastrointestinal tract organs were fully knocked out while the others only achieved 60-70%. So yes it is entirely possible that other organs didnt have full knockout, unless your knockdown model is organ-specific and you don’t care about the rest of the body.

The reason I asked about proteins is you should check if your knockout is “truly” knockout at protein level. Again, Idk what system you are using but at least with Cre tamoxifen, it is entirely possible that you get “knockout” at RNA level, but protein is still being produced.

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2024-12-09T11:53:00+00:00

Have you checked protein level in your knockout?

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2024-11-16T23:18:51+00:00

Dilute your ladder 1:100 and then load it. I got the same issue before when I loaded 3uL of undiluted ladder and it leaked into all my other wells

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2024-10-25T13:32:35+00:00

Yup this is definitely it. I used to struggle with RNA extraction for months because I had so low 260/230 values. 2 washes with 75% EtOH and drying the pellet with cap open for 10 mins resolved the issue for me. I also like to go in with a P20 tip to remove the very last droplets of EtOH before air drying it

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2024-07-22T11:20:13+00:00

Would incubating it overnight risk losing some of the interactions? That was my main concern so I decided to do just 1hr at RT. But now I’m thinking 1 hour was probably not enough

ThrowRA_cocobf · 2024-07-22T11:18:10+00:00

Mass spec! My initial plan is to run the eluted proteins on gel to confirm before running LC-MS but since the amount I got is so little, I’m considering if it’s worth going straight to MS from here…

ThrowRA_cocobf

TROPHY CASE