Pass the protocol

Lab pages Major labs, especially those working on a single experimental organism, increasingly share their experience through the web. Nematode researchers, for example, will find useful worm-specific material at http://www.dartmouth.edu/artsci/bio/ ambros/protocols.html. It seems Drosophila labs are more shy when it comes to sharing protocols, but the contribution from Rich Carthew’s lab (http://info.pitt.edu/~carthew/manual/ Manual.html) may start a trend. Graduate students starting out in biochemically oriented Xenopus labs should definitely take a look at the protocols from Tim Mitchison’s lab (http://util.ucsf.edu/mitchi/Protocols/ protocols.html). Refreshingly informal, these methods include the crucial minutiae usually only picked up through bitter experience, such as “Add a tiny pinch of NaBH4. Make sure the sample is in a large tube since it tends to fizz up.” Even for techniques which rely heavily on hands-on experience, such as microinjection of single cells, the Mitchison lab’s pages suggest tips and tricks which could help even an old hand. Until recently, this sort of information circulated only to a lucky subset of researchers, through course hand-outs and chains of faded photocopies; here, at least, the web seems to be democratizing science.