In another step of my ongoing quest to make synthetic biology engineering simpler and reliable, my collaborators and I are starting another big interlaboratory study focusing on precise measurement of fluorescence. We're now in the very nervous part, where all of the samples of material that everybody helping out with the study is going to measure have just been shipped out, and I'm hoping that the numbers that come back will be nice and tight, just like the preliminary study showed.
It takes a lot of work to put a study like this together---much more than I would have anticipated before I started doing this sort of thing. We've spent several months figuring out how exactly we want to run the experiment, and documenting it all as precisely as possible in order to make sure everybody does it the same way. Then my colleague Nicholas at MIT spent quite a bit of time over the past 24 hours preparing 875 sample tubes and packing them into boxes. As Nicholas put it: "On a completely unrelated note my lab is currently low on Eppie tubes."
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| Nicholas DeLateur preparing samples for shipment. |
One step at a time, of such careful and unglamorous work, does science and engineering move forward, and I am grateful for all of the people I have found who understand its value and join in working together on such steps.
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