As a graduate student and postdoc, Doug Juers never had to worry about money; he worked in Howard Hughes Medical Institute-funded labs that were flush with cash. Since recently joining the departments of physics and biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular biology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., however, Juers has had to learn a lot about belt-tightening. Even accounting for a much smaller research group, Juers is working with just 10% of his former labs' annual budget.
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One of the best ways to save money, says Juers, is to "stay away from the latest technical developments, and make do with the previous generation of equipment." Juers bought a 10-year-old spectrophotometer from the US Department of Energy. "I spent some money to get it overhauled, but it works great, and at about one-tenth the cost of a new machine with similar capability," says Juers. His lab has also been using a 40-year-old sonicator. In his former labs, "we would have replaced that sonicator," Juers says, but he's making good use of it.
The Scientist contacted researchers around the world, looking for their tips and tricks for saving money in the lab; here we present 15 of our favorites. Some you may have considered, others you may not agree with. There are trade offs: many financial gains are offset by time penalties or a loss of convenience. But if you follow them all you, could save some $29,000 this year--a significant portion of most lab's supply budgets. Thomas Chiles, professor of biology at Boston College, has a fairly typical lab: 10 members and two National Institutes of Health RO1 grants. "A typical supply budget for my lab is $40,000-$50,000 per year," he says. "If we could cut that by 20%, if we could save $10,000, that would be a significant savings.... We would certainly look at how to adopt some of these savings plans."
1 MAKE YOUR OWN Reagents
Steve Arch's lab at Reed College in Portland, Ore., generally avoids premade kits, buffers, standards, and gels, and not just for economic reasons. "I think people should know what they're working with and how it works," says Arch, a professor of biology.
For instance, commercial plasmid preparation kits are great when you need high-quality DNA quickly, says Hilary Kemp, a postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC) in Seattle. But "it is much less expensive to prep the DNA using the old phenol-chloroform technique." Ditto for coating your own microscope slides, or even building your own DNA arrays.
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There are tradeoffs, of course. If a commercial formulation includes a proprietary ingredient, you'll probably have to stick with it, says Melanie Roberts, a graduate student in neurobiology and behavior at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. In some cases, adds Kemp, "the kit doesn't just save time: It makes a high-throughput method possible."
DNA MINI PREPS
Qiagen plasmid mini kits, 250 reactions: $290 ($1.16 each) Do-it-yourself alkaline-lysis minipreps: approx. $0.31 each Savings per prep: $0.85 If your lab performs 1,000 preps/year, you...
doi: https://doi.org/10./d-024--6
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