#[ sobbu ] | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

questionablepastries · 2 years

Text

cant believe i gotta remake this

I SPENT LIKE TWO HOURS EXPLANINGIN EVERYTHING AND IT ALL GOT DELTED BY MISTAKE AAAAAAAA BUT guess what im gonna do it again even tho the first one took me like two hours but this means i get to go HARDER @arsenicshots do YOU HEAR ME YOU BETTER READ ALL OF IT IM SPENDING TIME ON THIS!!!!! YOU OWE ME (i can hear you say “but i didnt ask for this much explanation!!” well too bad!!!) and i swear if something crashes, ruining this upload for a second time there will not be a third time. I will be personally calling your cell. YOU THINK YOU CAN JUST ASK YOUR (ASCP) CERTIFIED ™ SCIENTIST FRIEND TO EXPLAIN ALL THIS??? HUH???? HMM?????

well its going under a readmore

sigh i cant believe im writing this all again... sobbu. anyways, this is for the curious with too much time on their hands, or if your name is alberto and you asked for some damn lab equipment explanation for some damn reason thinking this type of equipment can be concisely explained in a few words without context. that kind of explanation is not gonna happen, i dont think its possible. if you wanted a concise explanation ur welcome to look at the meme and do a 180 and walk away because welcome to class. This is gonna be lengthy, have pictures, and many links whenever and to wherever i feel like. and will not be deleted by mistake this time. (hopefully)

For context, i work in a bio hazard safety level 2 microbiology pathology lab at a fairly large (approaching 1000 bed) hospital so everything i explain will be with that frame of reference, ill even toss in some personal anecdotes for when ive had to use this stuff myself whether in the lab or as a student, ok? Onwards--

1. Hand saunas

putting aside the fact that this is the second time im writing a fucking paragraph about gloves. They’re gloves. They can be made out of various things, in case someone is allergic to whatever its made out of that i cant be half assed to look up. If someone really doesnt like gloves or if theyre allergic to latex u can wear these cotton ones that you can then put normal gloves over.

2 of my coworkers use them. idk i asked one of them once if it was for allergies or if it was for easier removal of normal latex gloves and they quickly told me “neither” and walked away so there’s that. he’s not very nice. i dont like that coworker a lot.

If you work in a lab gloves are a staple, you always want these babies on, people touch keyboards mouses and phones with gloves on lol. And when you wear gloves and get up to do things your hands are of course gonna get sweaty, but because youre manhandling (exaggerating, kinda.) infectious fluids all day youre gonna want to change them fairly frequently (universal precautions? hello?) I wear like 10 pairs of gloves at once when i have to run covid tests that are gonna be ran on the Genexpert or biofire whatever machine that poops out a turnaround time depending on the severity of the infection but thats getting off topic and we’re talking about gloves and lemme tell u when you have sweaty hands and try to put on a new pair of gloves its like putting on a wet pair of pants and it Sucks.

2. Piper bois

These are pipettes. They come in many different sizes and are meant to dispense extremely accurate volumes of fluid. amounts vary from mililiters to microlitres (microliters use the greek symbol mu as their measurement so we would write “uL”)

They can look scary sometimes

wow only $1699 how affordable. most modern pipettes come in the $1k price range. not that anyone cares but the description mentions that these pipettes are meant for PCR tests which are the same kind of tests we run on covid samples. i know a chick in the back of the lab that uses a pipette that looks pretty close to pic related. she uses it for covid research related reasons.

here’s a too in depth overall diagram about the pipettes themselves, that are closer to the kind that i use. the most important parts of that diagram are the Volumeter display that tells u how much fluid that thing will shit out, the push button that u push down to dispense the fluid, aaaaaand the tip ejector button. which can launch off the pipette tip quite a distance lol (will talk more about that in #3)

Using these damn things takes finesse because when you push the button to dispense fluid there will be some resistance u feel that tells u to stop pushing, because if you keep pushing youre gonna get something scientists try to avoid called a “blow out”.

this farmer (is he really) on quora explains the concept im not willing to type out about pipettes and why u should stop pushing when u feel resistance. im telling you theres technique!! finesse!!!

top right is what im talking about, “first stop” being the resistance u feel A B and C seem to describe how u first Push down to A, release for B and then push down Again to dispense fluid in C. so its like a diagram for the motion u go through. D is for pushing shit all the way, and E is for pulling up from the second stop all the way up. Ive seen ppl go down to D and to E for the maximum amount of fluid withdrawn to prevent bubbles during the subsequent release of fluid (might start doing that honestly because bubbles in fluids dispensed cause so much problems for the machinery theyre EVIL)

this explains the concept of avoiding blow out again. the entire purpose is to dispense a very accurate volume of stuff so one drop off is actually a lot. remember how i said microliters are a measurement? one microlitre is like the size of a mothafuckin uhhhhh half a drop of liquid lol. times i work with microliters is when they wanna test ur piss for bacteria but you cant piss well it turns out we can use such a small amount of piss for plating purposes. when i say plating thats lab speak for “putting it on a petri dish”

i was gonna move on to the next topic but i wanna show you guys the older types of pipettes because these so far are all MODERN Expensive pipettes so smaller labs might be using the manual ones. (and while yes these modern pipettes are manual to a degree, there exist automatic pipettes that do da suckin and the dispensing for you but fuck that)

behold

ugly. theres a ton of different types of pipettes. i dont care to explain

u know they used to suck up fluids with their mouths at one end in the past like it was a damn straw? bleh, some of the lab folks ive spoken to have recalled tasting piss by accident in the past or worse yet blood or spinal fluid lol.

but then they invented bulbs so people could stop sucking with their mouths and i dont know why they didnt do that in the first place

these things are pretty long and these are for measuring like. mililiters.

there also exists disposable plastic pipettes that i use fairly often and i think everyone everywhere uses these.

wow they come in different volumes isnt that so neat, i probably got a virus on my computer from making that gif on a shady website but i think it was worth it. i use these pipettes when i have to do a rapid c.diff test to transfer diarrhea (25 ul to be specific) to a tiny cartridge. very smelly. anyways im tired of talking about pipettes

3. Piper boi hats

These are pipette tips.

Like pipettes themselves they come in many sizes and the appropriate pipette tip has to match the size of the pipette in terms of amount that you want dispensed.

this is a great picture, do u remember how i mentioned pipette tip dispensers on pipettes themselves earlier? well the pipette has a button thats like EJECT THIS MF RIGHT NOW and these sons of bitches LAUNCH off like GOODBYE speeds unknown to man into the biohazard bin. not much to say about these things. who would’ve guessed. um. they come in fancy little boxes. the ones at work have tape on them with the words “ do not throw box away” on it idk why because they’re wasting boxes regardless? i guess i can ask my supervisor why and i bet its for a reason ill find so boring ill forget the minute after.

4. Vibe check

wow its even on sale. this is called a Vortexer.

I use this to resuspend anything that settled to the bottom of fluids, containers, or if i want to get an even distribution of bacteria within a fluid before i withdraw fluid from it using a pipette. It actually vibrates things pretty Violently its pretty funny, i mean it vibrates so hard you can feel it on your entire hand. Level of violence can be adjusted using the silly knob u see on the picture, the ones we use are usually on 7 to 9. i have to resist the urge to place my face down on the plate every day, but even if i wanted to id have to wipe down the black pad we set things on because ew. and i really do mean that these things get violent becuase the one at work sometimes has the black pad launch off lmao

we put sterile cups on this thing, uh lab test tubes. lord help you if you place a test tube without a stopper on it on this thing because the liquid Will fly out (has happened to me before many a time) i mean they even had a splash shield lmao, bacteria EVERYWHERE, here’s a video with the time down to the second of the action happening so u can see this boy VIBRATE, and as u can imagine if that container didnt have a cap fluid would fly everywhere

5. Extreme ™ Merry Go Round

I am not explaining the concept of centrifugation ough ugh i guess i am UGH ok ok ill dumb it down FUCK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_centrifuge

for the detail hungry there’s your required reading.

u ever get on one of these damn things and feel the g force of all ur fluids going in one direction? well same theory, but for bacteria they get that sensation at like 6000 revolutions per minute (rpm) and experience hell before they die

extreme merry go round otherwise known as a Centrifuge. is a device for when u want all the particles floating around a in a fluid concentrated to a singular point, leaving behind all the solutes at the bottom of its container and leaving whats called a Supernatant that is (mostly) free of all solutes/precipitate at the top. The solutes/precipitate gets so stuck to the bottom it forms what we call a bullet/pellet.

The gif shows what you should expect ur thing to look like after u take it out of a centrifuge and it got spun correctly. At work when i have to deal with spinal fluid, we want any potential pathogen concentrated to one area for the purposes of examination on a gram stain. I would concentrate a large amount of spinal fluid in a centrifuge, remove excess supernatant using a disposable plastic pipette, leaving behind enough fluid just above the pellet. and then i would vortex it to re-suspend the pellet with stuff of interest now floating around the remaining liquid. does that all make sense? i hope it does i just told u what a pipette was and a vortex was like a minute ago

centrifuges come in various sizes, and designs the meme pic has one thats pretty small. and meant for like 10 test tubes. the ones i use at work have this thing called a swinging bucket. The bucket will swing backwards while the centrifuge spins. to the point that theyre horizontal.

this nice lady from google is holding whats called a bucket which is meant to hold like idk a lot of test tubes and they all go into that. wait a fucking minute that looks like the exact fucking centrifuge at work i recognize those fucking buttons that son of a bitch, i have to stand on my tippy toes and apply my entire body weight to the lid when i shut it for the damn thing to register that its closed before i start it >:/

the thing thats orange in that pic is the lid u spin to close over the thing that holds the test tubes because sometimes these test tubes can spill and my god, spilled blood thats been spun at 5000 rpm looks like when u pop open an unsecured centrifuge uhh

anyways heres a good example. this holds test tubes and the larger volumes would be the purple top containers whose names slips my mind rn

centrifuges are used on blood (chemistry wants to analyze analytes in the serum), spinal fluid, piss (for protein electrophoresis purposes) and a bunch of other stuff im getting too tired to explain and theres no way im gonna explain what electrophoresis is --- (looks at #6) ah goddammit

#6. Evil Jello

sigh

agarose gel.

its agarose gel. or uh

ok, the evil jello in the pic is like the size of ur hand. However as everything in this damn information post, they can vary in size.

this one is like the size of a cat.

The whole purpose of agarose gel is (how the fuck am i gonna dumb this down) is uh..............

agarose gel is for a thing called electrophoresis.

“ Electrophoresis is a laboratory technique used to separate DNA, RNA or protein molecules based on their size and electrical charge. An electric current is used to move the molecules through a gel or other matrix “

in electrophoresis we use pipettes to transfer stuff into little jello sockets (called wells) the stuff injected into the wells are expected to travel a certain distance across the jello once a charge of electricity is applied to the jello. The stuff will travel across the jello depending on the amount of charge and its molecular size. as expected larger molecules will move slower and wont travel as far. smaller molecules will travel faster. Things move from negative (one end of the jello) to a positive charge (the charge applied to the opposite end). The movement is detected by a dye that is applied to before u even transferred the stuff to the wells. if you have a problem with a protein it’ll show up, if you dont it wont. i dont know i am so tired writing stuff lol. Go youtube this stuff. the Point is evil jello is not evil, except in that i am not allowed to bite into it like i so desperately want to

@arsenicshots you better read all this i swear to god

#lab #laboratory #scientist #medical lab technician #medical laboratory #im tagging this stuff for educational purposes because it rly is related to all those topics #lab technologist #personal #alberto imma k word you for this #this took two hours to make #four hours total if we count the first attempt

12 notes · View notes