The design, layout, and placement of laboratories have significant impact on lab processes, behaviors, and communications

Philip Schwartz, PhD, supervisor and senior scientist and director of the National Human Neural Stem Cell Resource at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County Research Institute, talks to Contributing Editor Tanuja Koppal, PhD, about the subtle particulars and expertise needed to design and maintain a laboratory dedicated to culturing stem cells.

Since their introduction, liquid sporicides have become one of the products of choice for many biological research and production facilities wherever high-level microbial control is critical. Although they are marketed as low-toxicity products, appropriate care during use is essential to prevent potentially dangerous conditions, exposures, and injuries.

Can you identify the hazards that are present? Are they chemical, physical, biological, mechanical, electrical, radiation, noise, stress, or high/low pressure? Those are life’s nine hazards and you should look for them before beginning an experiment.

Pipetting is part of nearly every laboratory’s workflow. Yet this established technology continues to undergo improvements, most related to usability and consistency.

For all its maturity and secure establishment in chemical analysis, predicting the future of gas chromatography is an exercise in uncertainty.

Chemical processing and analysis are fueling a resurgence of interest in highly purified specialty gases. Novel gas-phase chemical reactions reduce the number of unit operations and side products while eliminating the disposal of toxic solvents.

Across research laboratories and industrial manufacturing facilities, many processes must be kept at a specific temperature, and that requires baths and chillers.

In a 2012 report, Global Industry Analysts in San Jose, California forecast a growing market for carbon dioxide (CO2) incubators. That comes as no surprise given this technology’s laundry list of applicable fields, which includes cell and tissue culture, protein synthesis, and much more.

Lifeline Foods’ lab, which does quality control testing on the corn products the company produces before they are shipped to both domestic and international food and beverage manufacturers, faces unique challenges. We explore the management and communication issues necessary to maintain that lab’s success.

Microbiology—the study of microscopic organisms, mostly single-celled— is one of the deepest, broadest scientific disciplines.

Biological safety cabinets (BSCs) are crucial for the safety of staff and the protection of products, so it’s important to know when they should be upgraded.

Scientists have been combining new and old approaches to refine sequencing, but challenges remain 

Food testing labs have traditionally used conventional PCR and quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) to detect the presence of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food and feed. When quantification is required, GMO content in these samples is expressed in relative terms as the ratio of the quantity of the transgene, which is the nucleic acid fragment introduced in the host genome, to that of an endogene, a gene normally found in the host genome. 

As laboratory budgets tighten and laboratory automation purchases come under scrutiny, R&D efforts are still expected to function efficiently and with increased data quality.