Every April for the past five years, Lab Manager’s cover story has highlighted developments in green laboratory practices.

With freezers and fume hoods running nonstop, it’s no surprise that lab facilities hog more resources than do most other workspaces. 

Pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, research organizations, universities, and government agencies are continuously under pressure to cut costs due to a generalized economic downturn. This pressure has moved the procurement process to the forefront, with managers looking to achieve better business performance through more effective management of categories, suppliers, and teams.1

Three ways to avoid embarrassing yourself with colleagues and improve your “lab behavior.”

Ducks and water. Birds and sky. Squirrels and trees. Some things just fit their environments perfectly. Similarly, with their technological savvy, millennials could be considered the perfect fit for the laboratory, according to the lab managers we spoke with.

When the workforce consisted mainly of baby boomers, organizations were able to get away with a broad, blanket approach to workforce management.

Communicating the final design of a laboratory to the principal investigators and their research 
teams can be challenging. 

Translational research applies the findings and tools of science to define and solve problems.

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

At SLAS2015, the 4th Annual Conference and Exhibition of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, attendees got to check out a particularly versatile multimode microplate reader.

Indoor air quality commissioning to prevent issues after new construction or renovations.

Employers are responsible for ensuring that personal protective equipment (PPE) is available. 

Harm Moes is technical support engineer at SGS in the Netherlands. Mr. Moes has 13 years of experience in analytical instrumentation and held several technical positions with an analytical instrument supplier before joining SGS. At SGS, he provides technical support to the SGS oil, gas, and chemical labs in the Netherlands. That includes implementation and validation of new instrumentation, techniques, and methods, and instruction and training of laboratory personnel.

Dr. Nathaniel Hentz is assistant director of the analytical lab at the Golden LEAF Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center (BTEC), where he develops bioanalytical assays in support of the various biomanufacturing processes taught at BTEC. Since 2008, Dr. Hentz has been responsible for developing and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses, industry short courses, and government (FDA and BARDA) training courses, with a focus on assay development and validation, quality control, and liquid-handling performance.

Big data might bring more benefits to drug discovery than to any other field. For one thing, discovering a new drug turns out to be incredibly difficult. On average, a pharmaceutical company tries about 10,000 drug candidates for every one that ends up on the market. Plus, the process of discovering and developing a new drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars and takes more than a decade—some say more for both measurements.

Water testing laboratories hold a unique position among analytical facilities in their interaction with broadly diverse government and private entities

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration promulgated its good laboratory practices  (GLPs) for animal toxicology labs in 1979, the regulations were considered a breakthrough in compliance assurance.

When working with a biological safety cabinet (BSC), safety comes first. Nonetheless, it’s easy to make mistakes that can compromise a BSC’s performance.

With chillers, the solution is the same for achieving temperature control, cost-effective cooling protocols, energy savings, and long operating life: mechanical and operational efficiency.

When a scientist needs to concentrate a sample that’s in a volatile liquid—like acetone, acetonitrile, or methanol—a nitrogen evaporator can do the job. As a result, scientists use this technology in sample preparation in environmental, polymer science, quality control, and toxicology labs, plus others.

Total Organic Carbon (TOC) analyzers are a mainstay of environmental and quality control chemistry. TOC, a crucial metric in many processes, may arise from a combination of living or dead organisms or chemical contamination. Its measurement can serve as a surrogate for more difficult measurements or a screen for further analysis.

CO₂ incubators are designed to copy a cell’s natural environment with a relative humidity of around 95 percent, a temperature of 37°C and a pH of 7.2 to 7.5. They are most common in biology labs performing tissue or cell culture and are used in any process where cells need to be cultured for a few hours or many weeks or where cells need to be expanded or maintained.

Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs), one component of a lab’s information infrastructure, help laboratories capture and manage knowledge, streamline data management, protect intellectual property and foster collaboration. Both non-specific/generic ELNs (which compete directly against paper notebooks) and application/task-specific ELNs exist, each with their own fans.

Water is the most commonly used laboratory reagent; however, the importance of water quality is often overlooked. Because impurities can be a critical factor in many research experiments, water purity ranks high in importance. There are several types of impurities and contaminants in water such as particulates, organics, inorganics, microorganisms and pyrogens that can adversely affect results.

Water conservation has become a topic of interest in modern lab design. And in keeping up with current market needs, Labconco researched lab water usage and discovered one major sink hole — glass pipet washing.

The goal of achieving a truly paperless lab has been discussed for the past 20 years, but it is now, with technology catching up to the discussion, finally materializing. Nowhere is this more evident than in pharmaceutical Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) laboratories.

In virtually all research processes in which analytes and reagents are mixed in microplates, precise information on the starting volume in each plate well is critical