How to cut cost in a molecular biolog lab? - Please share your experience (Sep/23/2004 )

as crazy as this sounds, my director told us to cut cost in our lab..

i am at my wits end on thinking how to do this?

we have already been very careful in our spending..

all this while we use as much 'non-kit' as possible even though its a pain you know where!!! kits are expensive in our place..

i know of labs where they actually recycle their tips.. but i think that's a big NO-NO...

my neurons are just snapping off thinking about this..

what i think we should do is fire the management and hire new lab staff.
this way we save cost (the directors and managements obscene salary) and increase productivity at the same time! (just kidding)

I recalled the practice we followed some years ago but have long been abandoned.

Pack your tips by yourself (I used to spend half hour packing tips everyday)

Make all your buffers and solutions by yourself

Don't take seriously vendor's suggestion on the amount of products to be used and time to be expired. For example, now I am still using restriction enzymes which expired in 2000! All vendors of taqs provide a protocol for a 50 ul reaction, you can scale down to 5 ul without problem! Competent cell sellers tell you to use 100 ul for transformation, you can use only 25 ul without problem.

There are many other ways of saving cost, hope others will contribute.

actually, in my place, we do pack our tips after buying in bulks.. we normally ask the trainees to help.. they're a great lot..

buffers like TAE, TBE, extraction buffers.. you guessed it.. self prepared..

the boss fails to see that the reason why we are not making money for him is that we are only 1 year and 2 months old as a biotech company.. and we started from zero.. now we are trying to develop molecular testing services.. there's lack of research in here..

and i'm having sleepless nights as the dead-line draws near!

arghhhhh

Another way is to take good care of your equipment - expecially keeping it clean. This helps prevent calls from the service technician, makes all metal parts last longer before they become dangerously corroded, etc. Balancing centrifuge tubes carefully makes the drive last longer.

cheers,

Marj

we pack our tips as well. for my part it relaxes me. at times when i need to disconnect and just not think i pack them all( even for the lab mates). it´s funny that by the end of september almost all the labs here have no more funds (that´s the time when the grants expire/renewed) and we have to wait for october to be loaded again. what we do is for the meantime borrow reagents from other lab (although oftentimes it´s comes out free because we forget about it) but it does help you stay afloat for a while.
i agree with mario2004 that don´t follow everything what they say. things could still work out fine without being so meticulous.

Hi

Racking tips is a good way to cut costs, also check out supplier's special deals on equipment, reagents etc, you may spend a little longer on the web than usual but you can get some great deals.

Do you extract your own taq? I of course NEVER have, but I have heard of some people doing so. Saves a lot of money, but quality is not as good. I would tell your boss that you get what you pay for in molecular biology. The reason people spend money on kits is they save time in experiments and from having to redo them because the reagents weren't perfect.

They way that I cut costs in my labs are washing all of my utensils (not pipets thought) and use then over and over

Hi

There is a new electrophoresis buffer out called SB, which is just NaOH (10mM) pH adjusted to 8.5 with boric acid (works out at about 2.6g/L). Note the lack of Tris, which is the expensive part of TBE and TAE, but works just the same, in fact you can electrophorese at much higher voltage, I routinely run gels at 200v for 0.5 hr with the same resolution and separation as 2 hours at 50v in TBE.

Check out BioTechniques 36:2 pp214-215 2004 for the article.

Hi bob1
thabx alot for the SB buffer information. I used it but i m facing problems in resolution. I run 1kb marker on 0.8% agarose with 250volts for 30 min .
please help me if u have better results
regards