Setting up the lab

19/2
Since I fell asleep writing yesterday I will kind of continue that post now.
Not much have happened in addition to yesterday's lab setup/unpack craze. All our equipment successfully loaded and delivered to what was supposed to be our lab space, we started unpacking and setting everything up. This took most of the remaining time of the day. Since we have 270 kg of equipment with us (in 17 boxes) we had a fun time just moving around in a maze of equipment (not just our own).

Since we will be running samples in a qPCR (quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction) it is also important that we split our lab into two separate locations in different rooms. The reason for this is that the qPCR is run with our environmental samples and primers and probes for our target organisms, but to be able to actually calculate their abundance we have to have a standard serie as reference. So you can imagine the outcome if we accidentally contaminated our environmental samples with the standards? Crazy high numbers of cells/liter detected. Therefore we keep the standards in a completely different room from the rest of the qPCR reagents.

The following day (read 19/2) has mostly been organising our lab bench after unpacking and setting up and then a brief visit in downtown Nouméa to get some last minute supplies and cash (why we need cash now I'll get to later).

Oh, and I helped out with refilling some of the liquid nitrogen dewars (including ours) early this morning. It looks pretty cool with all the smoke it makes when in contact with the warm air and the liquid actually boils in contact with warm surfaces. We need the liquid nitrogen for flash freezing and storing samples.

The only major thing that needs to be done now is organising the qPCR, run the verification plate (just to make sure nothing has happened with it during shipping) and then a test run with the standards only.
I very much hope that our reagents are still functional since the -20 freezer broke down yesterday.Typical. At least we had a thermo box and some ice so I think we are good.

The departure from Nouméa has been postponed a second time, now scheduled for the morning of the 20/2.