Running out of time or money is something most of us strive to avoid. In business, as in life, the goal is to save as much of both as you can. This month we look at a few ways to achieve that goal in your lab. Let’s start with time.

According to a recent OSHA publication, there are more than 500,000 workers employed in laboratories in the United States.¹ And as lab managers, you know that laboratories can be potentially dangerous places to work.

Last year we reported a distressing decline in nearly every area of laboratory safety practices among the nearly 600 respondents who participated in the survey.

Research facilities, especially laboratories, are challenging places to work safely. This month, the Safety Guys alert you to potentially significant physical hazards present in the workplace.

Evaluating the move from in-house laboratories to independent providers

Human behavior is difficult to figure out. For example, take the way we all tend to treat “priorities.” We all have them, and we instinctively know that some of them are much more important than others. Such as our families. The people we love. That novel we’d like to write. That project we’d like to tackle that could lead to a cure for cancer.

Much has been written about the business benefits of outsourcing “noncore” activities, and this approach is now well-established in most chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies. By concentrating on core areas and working with specialists for other tasks, costs are better managed, efficiency is boosted, and ROI (return on investment) is increased.

When did the term “conflict” get such a bad name?

In order to increase efficiency, many companies today are under pressure to improve their time management practices.

It is a summer afternoon and dark clouds are rolling in. You notice that outside your laboratory windows the lightning strikes are getting closer. Your first thought is to back up your data. Your second thought is to shut down your $50,000 spectrometer so electrical surges from lightning strikes don’t kill the sensitive electronics.

The latest equipment, instrument and system introductions to the laboratory market.

Ike Harper, director for laboratory innovation at Johnson & Johnson, talks to contributing editor Tanuja Koppal, PhD, about the advantages of consolidating lab services with one provider. He explains in great
detail the steps taken at J&J to ensure that the right process and vendor were put in place in order to give the program the time and opportunity it needed to succeed. He emphasizes the need for external validation as well as internal communication and collaboration to get the necessary buy-in and support from the key people involved.

Prohibiting the storage of food in chemical refrigerators is another one of the basic rules of good practice.

Two features add efficiency, safety, and ease of use.

I’ve worked in hoods where a little piece of tissue paper attached to the bottom of the sash served as an indicator that it was exhausting the air. Somehow, that sounds like a prehistoric lab by today’s standards. Granted, it was a while ago, but I wasn’t using a dinosaur-era device.

Many labs use chromatography-based devices. Plus, different labs face different needs in handling chromatography data. Nearly any situation, though, benefits from a chromatography data system (CDS).

Particle sizing methodologies range from straightforward sieving and sedimentation analysis to advanced laser-based light scattering techniques, microscopy/imaging, nanoparticle tracking analysis, and others.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Waters’ (Milford, MA) debut of the ACQUITY UPLC®, the trademarked original on which all modern UHPLC systems, to various degrees, are modeled.

All around us is an invisible world that, while most people don’t often think about it, has big effects on our own. As principal investigator (PI) of the Michigan Geomicrobiology Lab in the University of Michigan’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Gregory Dick and his staff get to explore that world each day, studying how microorganisms influence larger Earth processes.

Equipment for dispensing and aspirating liquids runs the gamut from handheld pipettes that cost less than $100 to mid-range benchtop units to complex, fully robotic systems that cost $1 million or more.

Problem: Molecular biology relies on the ability to precisely target and amplify nucleic acids, and next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and cloning reactions benefit from precise size selection and analytical characterization of samples. For decades, researchers have used electrophoresis with agarose gels for both size selection and fragment-length distribution assessment of DNA samples for downstream assays.

Problem: Researchers and scientists generate and collect vast amounts of data in their work, whether they are running experiments in the lab or surveying and interviewing people on the street. Researchers typically don’t deal with their research outputs until towards the end of the research cycle, when poor organization and data management can be difficult to manage and address, but causes the most problems. Poor data management results in experiments that are harder to replicate and findings that may be called into question. Papers can be retracted, careers impacted and ultimately science can suffer. When researchers move on they may pass their work to others in their research group, where poor data management results in the group inheriting indecipherable written notes they cannot use.

Ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) spectrophotometry is arguably the most common as well as one of the oldest forms of absorption-based analysis. UV and visible regions of the electromagnetic spectrum are contiguous: UV wavelengths range from 10 to 4000 angstroms; they are visible from 4000 to 7000 angstroms.

Vacuum pumps are an essential piece of equipment and are used in a wide variety of processes in most laboratories. Over the past 25 years, it has become apparent that vendors have made significant innovative improvements to vacuum pumps, with important developments in high vacuum technology, corrosion resistance, vacuum control, and improvements in the efficiency and ecological impact of vacuum pumps.

For something so instrumental to keeping glassware clean, it only makes sense that maintaining the cleanliness of your lab washer is one of the keys to keeping it running properly.

After 15 years of constant improvement, S.C.A.T. SafetyCaps belong to the global safety standard in pharmaceutical and chemical laboratories. They enable operators to get solvent vapors under control and create perfect solvent conditions for their HPLC systems. The automated caps think ahead and fight health and environmental hazards directly at their origin - the solvent receptacle.