I have been training at updating my research skills for almost a decade now.
At the beginning it was obvious, it included a lot of “how-to”s: i.e. “how-to” propagate and culture cells, “how-to” separate proteins using SDS gel electrophoresis, “how-to” perform a Polymerase chain reaction and so on.
With each new project and each new position/role (undergraduate research assistant, graduate student, postdoctoral research fellow), I’ve had to update my list of “how-to”s in terms of new techniques required to implement my research, thus dedicating a lot of resources to improving my research “skill set”. In contrast, I haven’t dedicated resources deliberately to improving the fundamentals of my research process itself.
“Incredibly, the way we do our research has not fundamentally changed: a majority of labs continue to work using pen and paper to record, organize and even retrieve information.”
Modern research is an inherently high intensity endeavor where being fully-engaged is imperative for the researcher to solve puzzles that challenge the limits of the existing knowledge “status-quo” to extend the knowledge or obtain new discoveries. Yet, incredibly, the way we do our research has not fundamentally changed: a majority of labs (at least in academia) continue to work using pen and paper to record, organize and even retrieve information.
Increasingly, in molecular biology research, most instruments “input” and “output” in digital formats, but most experimental data is still recorded in analog. But, since the last year, I have been steadily “sneaking-in” electronic supplements (and in some-cases alternatives) to the use the old-faithful lab notebook in my day-to-day plans.
For example, one of the main chores of my current projects involves a lot of qPCR assays and I have been thankful for the access to an electronic, tablet-based interface to guide my pipetting for the qPCR reactions. You can see this in action in my research synopsis video:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjAlZ_3C62k[/embed]
“Is there a task that I perform which is repetitive and can be enhanced using electronic (or software-assisted) systems?”
So I don’t have to follow the old way of doing that task, which involved: making a plan (on excel or word), printing the plan (on good old paper) and then sticking it with tape to the PCR laminar hood and carefully plating the reagents and samples (there are 384 wells in a plate). So you can empathize that in a lab, one had to have an almost ascetic concentration to avoid errors due to any distractions. This was of course not a major impediment to successful pipetting given that I (and all researchers with experience) face comparatively greater challenges that the one above, on an almost a daily basis. This had an impact was on efficiency, as it always takes time away from other critical research tasks like contemplation, planning and collaboration.
As an exercise, I did a quick calculation on the time that I saved from migrating to an electronic pipetting plan prepared with PlatR versus the old manual plan. On average, I saved 30 minutes for each qPCR assay. I perform 10 assays a month. That’s 5 hours a month for almost a year, which accounts for 8 full working days, which I could avoid spending on just pipetting. Furthermore, this does not include the time or the cost (in expensive reagents) that I undoubtedly saved avoiding “distraction-based” errors with the old system.
Neither does it include my “user experience” with the new system as in I feel less stressed from having spent lesser time on an intense research activity, and which subsequently leaves me more energized to engage in my next task. This self-realization has now set me on a path of introspecting my own research mechanics. Is there a task that I perform which is repetitive and can be enhanced using electronic (or software-assisted) systems? There are many indeed…
The first of these to be tackled was sample organization and I’m happy to report that this too has elevated my research “quality of life” similar to my experience with the guided-pipetting above.
I have grown to become a research artisan: seeking to improve the art of practicing my research.
Do any of you have similar experiences in your research? Please share your stories with us at Twitter or Facebook.
By Mukundh N. Balasubramanian, PhD
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