Many lab managers still remember them from their student days—a handful of hastily stapled printouts sternly titled “Laboratory etiquette—Acceptable standards of conduct.” Those were rules to live by, and the smallest violation landed a budding laboratory scientist in front of the ticked-off chief instructor.

With the invention of the centrifuge came the problem of rotor balance. Specimen containers must be properly sized and properly located on the rotor to provide rotor balance each and every cycle.

Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) are commonly used in diagnostic and quality-control laboratories. During an ELISA, an unknown amount of antigen is immobilized to the surface of a microplate well and an enzyme-linked antibody is subsequently bound.

Managing a lab is a tough job for a number of reasons, especially for those lab managers who work in regulated industries. In those industries, keeping your team members up to date on the latest safety, environmental, or process information is critical to a company’s success.

Formaldehyde is one of the nastiest chemicals around

Emily Anna Bridges, laboratory manager in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine, shares her harrowing experiences when the aged water purification system supplying water to her research building stopped functioning entirely, after months of causing leaks and contamination problems.