The lab

It's now time for a tour of my lab. I've shown you some of it before, but perhaps a more thorough job is in order.

Here is my desk:I would like to claim it's usually more tidy than this, but it isn't. It's a workplace, with papers here and there. My lab book is on the left, open to some relevant page. You can see pens and highlighters, sticky notes and mess all around. It bothers me sometimes, so I clean it up, but inevitably it returns to this state of entropy.
This is my UBC travel mug. Bonnie gave it to me when I moved to Edmonton and I've used it every day since then. I mostly drink water in it, but I also take it down to the coffee shop or Tim Horton's and get tea or coffee in it.This is my new Christmas mug. Garrett's Mom gave it to me from their trip to Niagara Falls. The bottom is signed by the artist. I like it because, some days, it's just the right size for a warm drink.These are my textbooks. On the rightmost side are textbooks from undergrad that are still moderately useful now. I've actually used the orange one numerous times during grad school, so it was worth the money I paid for it, but the other ones - not so much. In the middle are booklets from conferences that I've attended, and on the left are the textbooks I bought during grad school - Field's Virology. It's only the most comprehensive textbook on viruses out there! I know, I'm a nerd.This is my drawer with my files. Mostly journal articles and protocols, but also scholarship applications and random forms. Manuals, certificates...all that junk.This is the top drawer of my desk. Pens, pencils, scissors, tape, paperclips, thumb tacks, comb, etc etc etc.This is the very top shelf of my desk. It holds old posters of my data, textbooks and notebooks from undergrad and grad classes that are relevant to my field and a stack of re-usable paper on the left.This is my snack shelf. I have tea, hot chocolate, popcorn, fruit bars and crackers. The little yellow jar is sugar, to add to my tea or coffee.This is my cartoon cat calendar. I've had this same style of calendar for two years, and just purchased a new one again for this upcoming year. Even though the cartoons don't always make sense to me, I just like them for some reason.Moving out into the lab, here is my lab bench.It's one of the tidier benches in the lab. Even though I can't seem to keep my desk very neat, my bench is always pretty clean, at least at the end of the day. When I'm actually doing bench work, it can be messy as all heck, but I always put everything away at the end of the day. At the end of my bench is a microcentrifuge (for spinning liquids). At the near end of the bench is a vortexer (beige coloured square in the bottom right). The plastic beakers are discard bins for waste and the blue boxes contain plastic tips that go on the end of my pipettors. I'm not sure if non-scientists have any idea of what I'm talking about, but I don't know an easy way to describe all this so I just won't.

These are my pipettors. Also know as pipettes, I suppose. They measure volumes from 1 millilitre down to 0.5 microlitres. You can also see a box latex gloves in the background too.These are my containers of microfuge tubes, along with my tube racks - colourful! Over the last few years, I've collected some great coloured racks. I like them. I guard them from theft from my lab mates.This is just a couple shelves of my bottles of reagents. Most I use on a regular basis, some are used less frequently. I try not to keep stuff around too long if I'm never going to use it again, since other people might need the bottles for themselves.Now onto some of the equipment in my lab. This is a thermocycler. It holds tubes and can be set for a large range of temperatures for different amounts of time. It's mainly used for PCR.This area is our radioactive area. We work with radioisotopes around here. You have to be trained to work with this stuff to make sure it's safe and clean.This bench holds (front to back) our shaker platform, 42 degree C water bath, 37 degree C water bath, microcentrifuge and hybridization oven.This is my shelf in our freezer, with all my boxes of samples.This is one of our biosafety cabinets.Here's our tissue culture room with more biosafety cabinets. That's Rineke!This is our lab microwave. We use it to heat water and agarose. Don't heat your lunch in that sucker!This is our plate reader. Basically a spectrophotometer that reads 96-well plates.This is our warming cabinet (37 degrees C) for warming media or incubating certain reactions.This is our flammables cabinet.This is our Lightcycler for quantitative PCR. It's sadly out of date, but we should be getting a new one soon.This is our desk area. We are cram-packed in there now, since my supervisor hired a bunch of new people and we have two undergrads kicking around too. But we manage and it's nice to have a fun group of people to work with.This is one of our microscopes. It's in the tissue culture room and we mostly use it for looking at cells. It doesn't have high magnification - our other microscopes are better for higher magnification.This is our countertop centrifuge, for larger tubes than the microcentrifuge will hold. It doesn't go past 4000rpm, so if you need to spin faster than that, you'll have to use our large format centrifuge or our ultracentrifuge (very high speeds). Ya, we have a lot of centrifuges.This is our tissue culture cell incubator. It keeps the cells at 37 degrees C with CO2 to buffer the media.And for the grand finale, here's a video of how fun science can be!!

I'm igniting nitrocellulose membranes that are leftover from experiments. Hooray for science!