Blogrolling: Tales of the Genomic Repairman
July 27, 2009
The blog “Tales of the Genomic Repairman” is authored by:
A semi-cultured, good-natured graduate student in biomedical sciences who escaped out of the deep south.
Sounds intriguing, let’s sample.
Ode to My Angry Antigen:
Oh why is it taking me so long to produce you, my fair antigen. I need you to make some mouse monoclonal antibodies to do some experiment with my controls to determine specificity and maybe sell my stuff off to Santa Cruz as their antibody is utter bullshit.
ahh…”good natured” you say? HAHAHA! good one!
I feel like a girl waiting by the phone
for some guy named fellowship to call me. Its pretty close to notification time as the selection committee has taken their sweet time to review, scrutinize, comment on, and line their birdcages with the proposals. Hopefully Polly isn’t crapping on mine right now.
amazingly enough, the Polly targeting system works as well as any to rank the proposals in your pile of fellowship applications, my friend*.
Pull out the liferafts, PI’s are jumping ship
So the PI who got moved from being our division director as well as department chairman (read here and here) may be packing up his game and heading out not too far west to somewhere else. This is still shaky as I think the negotiations are playing out in real time. But this sucks as I have two friends who are grad students in the lab
Trainees usually bear the brunt. It’s brutal when mid career folks start looking around for newer / greener pastures. They don’t want to tell the lab too early because then they will all bail or at least stop coming to the lab and acting all depressed. And in many cases it takes a few tries, potentially over several years, for the mid career scientist to find that sweet, sweet offer- time in which the grads and postdocs can be finished up and gone anyway.
Lab meeting and other time sucking activities
So I’m losing over 3 hours of my work week to lab meetings.
ahhh, meetings.
_
*that was a joke people.
DrugMonkey 
July 27, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Dude- Santa Cruz antibodies are enough to turn an entire fucking carebear teaparty into a republican national convention. It is in no way a reflection on one’s good naturedness to bitch about them; it is a reflection of good sense.
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July 27, 2009 at 9:22 pm
in almost all labs here the very mention of santa cruz results in scoffing and eye-rolling about how much they suck. i’m with becca here.
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July 27, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Me, knowing absolutely zip about antibodies, ordered two last week- one from AbCam, and one from Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz antibody arrived as a vial in a box. No packing, no paperwork, no information, no ‘dilution factor’ or some such nonsense, which I’m told is critical.
Reading this shit, I’m now even more frightened than before about what’s in that Santa Cruz vial. And do you people know how LONG it takes to do a Western blot?!? I cannot possibly be doing these things for fun.
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July 27, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Well, my GAPDH from santa cruz is groovy. And plenty of others are ok. It’s just when it fails, it’s Epic Fail. I’m pretty sure they distribute antibodies that are actually made by completely different places.
Normally they all arrive with info sheets though- that’s wonky.
According to me, WBs take long enough to allow ample commenting time. According to Millipore, they take 22 minutes (google “snap ID”)*
*Note, I am in no way being paid by millipore. But if they’d send me a free one I’d pimp their product like they wouldn’t believe.
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July 28, 2009 at 12:26 am
This antibody was from SantaCruz. It has served me well since I got it (well, until last week anyway). The 5 others I got as a sort of promotional deal, never or only the once. Fickle, fickle things.
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July 28, 2009 at 1:41 am
scbt is definitely a very hit or miss operation. when it’s a hit, you’re golden. it’s the total crap shoot nature of the product quality status that is generally railed against. i had better luck with sigma, abcam, and abnova for the proteins i was targeting.
antibodies are gonna take some banging around to find optimal dilution factors anyway. take heart, that time is going to be wasted. 🙂
but srsly, if i never do a western again, it will be too soon.
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July 28, 2009 at 9:53 am
I will never buy from Cell Signaling again unless I absolutely have to. I fought with them for about a year about one of the components of one of their antibody cocktails. Its signal strength degraded much faster than the other components, and I sent them all this data showing it with my lysates and their own control lysates they send with the product. They sent me one tube of replacement to supplement that particular component, but it was only enough to cover half of the remaining product we had. They then refused to send a second supplement tube, and even accidentally forwarded through the snotty email that our sales rep had sent to the tech support people bitching about me and my lab. HAH!
I even told them if they updated their lot of material, I would keep buying the cocktail from them. But they just responded that the lot they have is still the same faulty one. After all that, they refused to fix the product they even admitted had a problem.
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July 28, 2009 at 10:11 am
For the neuro readers ISO mouse monoclonal Abs, NeuroMab. And yeah, all antibodies have an element of crapshoot about them, but SC’s are crappier, or shootier, than others.
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July 28, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Ah, SantaCrap. So many happy days in the lab wondering why my positive controls wouldn’t work.
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July 28, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I have to chime in with my own SCBT stories:
1. I worked in quality control there for a summer when I was 19, doing Westerns all day. When I returned during winter break, they’d cut the department from 12 to 4 people. Also, the CEO let his dog wander around the labs.
2. My grad lab got any antibodies they wanted from SCBT for free. Of course, we were essentially doing a lot of their QC for them, since most of what we were doing was not Westerns. Also, I know at least once they made an antibody for us with a peptide we gave them, and then put it in the catalog when we got good results with it.
There are specific antibodies that work quite well, but they don’t have the resources to thoroughly check each one for all techniques.
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July 30, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Thanks for the love drug monkey! In SCBT’s defense, they make some antibodies really well and some not so well. They are like the Toyota Camry of antibodies: Reliable, not inspiring. I’ve had a bad rash of dealing with them, and their are marketing some crap antibodies in my field. So instead about bitching about using theirs, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and make my own.
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