I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food. Eating, cooking, foraging, reading and writing about food are always at the front of my mind. I consider going to restaurants a full-blown hobby (and a most excellent occupation). Since I spend the majority of my waking hours in a laboratory, a lot of my food day dreaming has no choice but take place in a lab. Many may be disturbed by the combination of lab and food. In reality, labs are full of edibles – you just have to look closely to find them.
- The most obvious lab food items are seaweed extracts such as agar and sodium alginate. The former is prized by vegans as an animal product-free Jell-O alternative, while the latter has been elevated to new heights by Ferran Adria, the originator of molecular gastronomy and chef of El Bulli, one of the best-known restaurants in the world. Adria uses sodium alginate to create liquid pea ravioli, in which a thin membrane encloses a sphere of bright green pea soup. The bubble bursts in the mouth, releasing the soup and all of its glorious flavor in one big gush.
- We use 5% milk to block Western blots. It is ordinary, reconstituted non-fat dried milk, whatever brand happens to be sold in bulk at Costco. Milk in itself is not terribly appealing, however, one of the labs I rotated in used autoclaved milk for storing HSV plaque picks (why, I have absolutely no idea). Autoclaving milk turns it a beautiful light caramel color. Does autoclaved milk taste slightly bitter and sweet, like burnt sugar, or is it simply burnt? I had to exhibit considerable self control not to tip some out into my cupped hand and try a sip. I would have done, if it wasn’t for the disgusted and perplexed stares shot my way when I mentioned it.
- Bottles of ultra pure PCR-grade water line a shelf in my lab. Would be the best, cleanest and crispest tasting water of all time, putting Poland Spring and Evian to shame? Likely not since its deionized, but it calls to me nonetheless.
- I, on multiple occasions, have gazed longingly at a giant jug of purified caffeine sitting on the dry chemical shelf. Enough said.
That’s all I can think of at the moment. Have I missed anything? What other food-related items are found in labs? I promise not to tell the radioactivity surveyor.
P.S. On a related note, while in the grip of severe L.O.M. (lack of motivation), my new labmates determined that ocean water is approximately 0.5M sodium chloride. That makes our 5M stock solutions of sodium chloride, 10X ocean.
This is only a guess, but I would think the reason to used autoclaved milk is to deactivate some of the enzymes such as xanthine oxidase, lysozyme, lactoperoxidase and lactoferrin that might damage the HSV plaques. That and it prevents contamination by something else, viral, bacterial or other.
David – Yes, you are absolutely correct. That is why one autoclaves milk. Why use the autoclaved milk for storing plaque picks is less clear – in my lab we freeze them in complete DMEM. The advantage of using milk is the part I don’t understand.
Again this is a guess, but think that milk is used to buffer stuff, metals, pH, redox, osmotic strength, etc, and is compatable with what ever culture system the plaques are going to be used on, and won’t interfere with any of the down stream analysis.
I don’t know, but I would speculate that milk has some DNAase and RNAase activity and so milk is for the most part free of exogenous DNA and RNA and then when you autoclave it you inactivate them and have a media that is free of exogenous DNA.
Or it may just be mythic lore passed down from the dark ages when the lab ran out of what they normally used and so they tried it and it worked better than anything else ever did.
Hi Anna, I too spend an inordinate amount of time thinking of food (as you know) ... Some other food-related things in my lab: we use strawberry Jell-O to give rodents post-surgery analgesics; they love it! Also, in a former lab we studied feeding behavior, so we had reason to buy lots of different rodent diets. According to my boss, the high fat one tasted pretty good … hmmmm …
In physics labs it’s OK to use the lunch milk box, sugar, and liquid nitrogen to make a quick ice cream.