Proven Lab Techniques

This is basically an attempt at comedy I came up with as I was supposed to be the compere of a talent show put on by the local graduate students. So I presented it like a lecture about  some experimental techniques which though widely used, they were likely not too familiar with, though in my lab we have done all of them, except the very last one, so far anyway.
Bottom or Butt
Blotting
 You have all heard to Northern, Southern, Western blotting techniques well, a further widely used technique is Bottom blotting, also known as Butt blotting, and comes about from leaving gels on seats and having someone sit on them. This is a technique which, though widely employed, has no known utility.
Linoleum
Blotting
 A related technique is Linoleum blotting, which involves dropping a gel onto the floor tiles, picking it up again and then continuing with the experiment. The linoleum gel fragmentation assay is a related technique, which involves applying the gel to the linoleum with significantly more vigor. You then pick up the pieces of the gel and try to figure out how they fit together. Another technique widely used in my lab is…
Note Book
Chromatography
 This technique makes use of the excellent absorbent properties of your notebook. You can apply your protein and DNA samples directly to your notebook, providing a permanent record of what you have been doing. When you see me doing an experiment you might come away with the impression that I’m a sloppy bastard, since my reagents appear to be splashing all over the place. In fact I’m making use of this powerful documentation technique.
Projectile
PCR
 Another powerful technique is Projectile PCR, which makes use of the fact that PCR tubes are small slimy things which slip readily out of your hand, flying across the room and typically landing behind the refrigerator. When you look behind the fridge you find several other PCR tubes all with the labels dissolved in the oil, so you have no idea which is the one you lost. Because of this feature of projectile PCR is often used in combination with the extreme rigor of triple blind analysis. A triple blind study is one in which neither you, nor your coworker, nor in fact anyone else in the world has any idea which sample is which, or even if they are in fact PCR samples. If your hypothesis is still tenable after that kind of rigorous analysis it must have been really good.
Desk top
concentration
 This consists of spilling your sample on the bench top and then returning it to the vessel from which you spilled it. Since you only ever get about half of it back, I estimate that this procedure might give you a rapid, one step, 50% concentration, though I must admit I haven’t actually quantitated the method in detail.
Protocol step
excision
 One of the real problems of science at the graduate student level is that it interferes with your social life, but there are fortunately several techniques to get round this. One widely used technique is protocol step excision. It frequently happens that you have a very long protocol to follow and you want to go to a movie or get laid or something, so you look through it and it has 12 steps. Choose the two or three steps that look the most boring and time consuming and simply skip them, allowing you to get finished on time. Your mentor probably won’t notice, since he or she probably didn’t read the protocol and probably figured it wouldn’t work anyway.
Protocol length
extension
 A complementary technique useful in many cases is protocol length extension, in which you typically change all 15-minute steps to 1 hour and all 30-minute steps to 2 hours. This has the advantage that you can honestly tell your mentor that you’re doing whatever the procedure is and still have time to go shopping in the mall, get your hair done, etc.
Extended
overnight
incubation
 When protocol length extension gets out of hand it frequently develops into Extended overnight incubation. Many protocols conveniently allow you to put stuff at –20°C overnight, and extended overnight incubation merely takes this to the logical conclusion, so you can keep the stuff it in the fridge for several days, weeks, months or even years. By then your mentor will probably have forgotten all about the experiment.
Vehicular
Biology
 Another way to avoid messing up your social life is to use the techniques of molecular biology combined with motor vehicles, hence vehicular biology, a technique I invented when I was a postdoc. I wanted to go to this party, but I also wanted to get a gel run. So I got the gel, powerpack, bottle of buffer, staining solution and destain, loaded them up into my car, and went off to the party and set up the stuff to run the gel in the spare room. Unfortunately then I forgot all about it and the protein ran off the bottom of the gel, but at least I didn’t miss the party. This technique can probably be applied to most routine and time consuming lab procedures such as PCR, column chromatography and electrophysiology.
Losing
stuff
 A further big scientific problem is loosing stuff in the fridge, darkroom or wherever you are experimenting. There are numerous variations on this technique such as out of situ hybridization, total loss protein purification, immunoerradication, gene misplacement therapy, and so on.
Polymerase
Drain Reaction
(PDR)
 Control experiments are very important in science, and one good one is the Polymerase drain reaction. This is basically a PCR in which you forget one of the vital components, and of course if you forget accurately there should be no product. However if you forget things in a way which lacks experimental rigor, you will get some bizarre product telling you that you need to forget things more carefully in future.
Sink Filtration
 The PDR reaction product ends up, as its name suggests, in the drain. This is a general approach applied to many experimental paradigms, usually called sink filtration, which is one of the most basic and frequently performed procedures for the elimination of experimental results.
Bad Smells
 Another problem in biology is using old reagents which have gone off. Since many of these smell bad this has generated a lot of techniques such as immunoflatulance, affinity putrefaction, restriction fragment stench polymorphism and Mouldy-TOF. The basic take home message from all these techniques is if it smells bad you probably screwed it up.
Total Laboratory Pyrolysis
 So finally if despite trying all of these techniques you still have spent several years as a graduate student without generating any useful data there is one technique of last resort. This is total laboratory pyrolysis, which involves burning down the lab and erasing all record of your misadventures and incompetence over the years.

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