Sunday September 10

A hot week in Biosciences. Hot as in the building sections where I work have minimal air conditioning and the weather decided to usher in September with a week of summer.  Not cook-an-egg-on-the-pavement hot but—don’t tell the safety officer—I kept my lab coat unbuttoned. 

I left work Friday a little after 6 PM feeling smug. I had just plated seeds on the plates I poured with the growth medium I made and autoclaved, all done that day. The lion’s share of the smugness surrounded the racks (Fig. 1). More on those in a moment. 

I got this far because the two missing chemicals arrived Friday noon. As an aside, ordering was a bit of an ordeal, Uni bureaucracy at its finest. To be fair, step 1 is good: the Uni here has a shopping platform that searches all of their contracted vendors. On the equivalent platform at UMass, each vendor needs to be checked, one at a time. Trouble comes at the next step, when checking out dumps you into the Uni’s requisition system. The system pretends to have no idea who you are, even tho to get this far at all, the system had to have bestowed upon you, specifically, the requisite powers. Because of this charade, you have to supply a great many bits of opaque adminese. Here, UMass wins because all of these fields are populated correctly for the person placing the order. I’ll learn the codes eventually. 

Putting seeds on plates is hardly novel: I have been making and using growth medium since 1990. Yet, I was hard at it, pretty much all afternoon, finding the autoclave tape, learning how to use the industrial-strength pressure cooker that serves as a small in-lab autoclave, adjusting for the surprising invisibility of arabidopsis seeds against the gray aluminum of the hood deck with a piece of white paper—a surprisingly difficult item to scare up amid labs full of bottles and test tubes. But all found and all working as needed. 

While the medium was in the autoclave having its bugs blasted, I organized two spaces for plant growth. One of them is a walk-in sized growth room, converted I suppose from a cold room. I was granted space on shelf there. But the lighting was hit or miss, mostly miss. I exchanged dead bulbs for live ones to get one complete bank of lights. I will need to find a light meter but I think the intensity will be about right. The other space is in a growth cabinet (British for “chamber”) in which a colleague here, Andy Plackett, could me spare a shelf. Andy and I fired it up and checked that it came to the appropriate temperature; in an hour or so, it did. 

Without a doubt, the fun doing all this was making racks to hold the plates (Fig. 1). In my lab at UMass, we have racks specially built from plexiglass. We do pretty much all of our experiments with plants on plates. But here, plates are kept sort-of vertical with haphazard assemblies of plastic boxes and tape. I was quite prepared to follow suit, when in Rome and all that. But earlier in looking at space for plant growth, I saw a brilliant piece of improvisation: racks made from metal freezer box inserts. I spoke with the person who had made them and they agreed that the racks were good but alas theirs had all but disappeared. None to lend me. But then incredibly, just after this discussion, I was buying razor blades at the stockroom when on the free-take-me table was box of exactly these metal freezer boxes. I took a few and had some craft fun making racks. My contribution to the design is to bend every other tooth back, providing support to keep the plate from leaning back too far. Nice to have plates standing close to vertical. These racks have no bottom so air circulation is great. 

I put two plates in each of the two spaces mentioned above and in a week or maybe ten days, I’ll find out in which space the roots grow fastest. And whether their growth rate is anywhere near what I consider reasonable. During the coming week, I will put plates in two additional spaces. I need to find a suitable space before getting to the real work. Arabidopsis—lab weed—is fussy.