Two weeks in the wetlab

The cells are expanded and have already been banked twice. I ran the first two experiments. Nothing special for now — mostly testing whether I have everything I need at hand, and exploring unknown unknowns in the lab. I’ve been receiving dozens of boxes and orders with reagents, consumables, etc. I’d say 80-90% are here already. Not everything has arrived yet, though, which is annoying. Some vendors were extremely slow in approving our first orders, and, e.g., protein production QC reagents ordered almost two weeks ago were approved on the vendor’s side only a couple of days ago.

We filed a ton of paperwork for various permits, insurance, etc. I received a local chemical waste inspector, who evaluated us — TL;DR we passed, but I lost half a day of work on that, and had no time to QC and debug my transfection calculator as a result!

A friend from Harvard also visited us, and inspected the quality of my pipetting, lab organization and cell culture work. He bullied me a bit for the lab coat our lab space provides not having tight sleeves, and for wanting to buy an adapter for the aspirator in the tissue culture hood (it’s 100% more convenient with it). Overall, I believe I passed his exam too, and it was definitely stricter than the inspector’s!

I have been casually trying to use smart glasses to record all the experiments I run in the tissue culture room. I’m mostly testing whether it’s a viable way to close the feedback loop from reality to paper/protocols/database, and to make sure that everything written in the protocol was actually done in reality. In the worst-case scenario, there would be a digital trace that would let me track down potential sample swaps, which happen all the time in the wetlab.

From day 1 to day 14 in the wetlab:

I’m definitely running out of space, and I had to offload a few boxes with consumables into our garage! My lab bench now reminds me of small corner restaurants with boxes stacked on top of each other to save more useful space!

The famous cart I use to move things to and from the tissue culture room:

The slowly growing and expanding cells — from one 125 mL flask to three 250 mL ones:

Lots of boxes with lab consumables, reagents, instruments, etc. that I had to unpack, and play Tetris with to fit into our available space:

Our company merch designed by Vlad:

The first 96-well plate with the first cells, used for the first experiment!

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