Good Laboratory and Research practices-Lecture series and workshop 20-09-14-IISER Mohali

IISER Mohali held a lecture series over a topic “Good laboratory and research practices for biology and PhD students” on 20th September 2014. It comprised of 4 lectures discussing GLP biosafety equipments and safety measures to biological and radiological hazards. The series started with the lecture of Dr. Anand from IISER, Mohali over the GLP discussing the events that has happened in the course of their carriers in order to educate the mass of MS and PhD students the significance of GLP in basic research. The talk greatly emphasized on the need of documenting each and every step of experiment that a student conducts. For instance he shared his experience of one of the repeat experiments conducted by his PhD students. While students repeated the experiment conducted by the technician they were not able to achieve same results. So they followed the lab notebook of technician who used to document each and every ponits in his Lab notebooks (In IISER the research staffs maintain log notebooks in which they pen down each and every detail of their experiments. They don’t consider this as raw book, but probably these lab note books act as their log for SOP, DRS and result forlder.) and found that the concentration of a single reagent was higher which was mistakenly added into their protocol. Dr. Anand claimed that without going back to records they could not have thought of changing the concentration of that reagent which ultimately led to similar results as to prior experiments. He appreciated the meticulousness of technician to note down everything which prevented them to rediscover the wheel. Dr. Anand quoted one sentence about record keeping that “Meticulous writing in lab notebooks are critical for troubleshooting the problems faced while repeating the experiments” Moderated by HOD of department who advised the audience “While conducting the experiment always ask yourself, can someone repeat my experiments 12 years later?” Following points were highlighted as how one can maintain the lab notebooks: