A fellow scientist and I were discussing different laboratory “aromas” the other day and the list we came up with felt like it was missing some key scents. So, I call on the power of NN to help us embellish this list. Thanks for your help.
So far,
Xylene, Benzene etc. (organic solvents – mention your favorite if you wish)
Natural Gas (i.e. mercaptan additive)
B-mercaptoethanol
FlyNap
Autoclaved animal bedding
See, this list is obviously lacking.
Cheers,
Butyric acid. My least favourite stink.
Agar.
There are quite a few treasures in this collection.
When I was a young pup doing my first job in science I worked next door to a protein sequencing lab. In the pre-routine molecular biology/DNA sequencing, and also pre-mass spec protein sequencing, era (this was early 1980) protein sequencing meant actual chemical reactions to chew off N-terminal residues followed by chromatography of the resulting derivatised amino acid. And no machines, at least not then. Anyway, all the buffers the protein sequencing people used contained pyridine, so protein sequencing labs stank characteristically of pyridine, which you could smell all down the corridor whenever they opened the door.
The most obnoxious smelling things I ever worked with were tertiary amines like trimethylamine and triethylamine, when we were doing lots of measuring intracellular pH with fluorescent indicators. We used trimethylamine to alkalinize intracellular pH, and conversely used stinky propionic and butyric acid (Frank Norman’s favourite) to acidify the cells. The major problem was getting anyone to do the experiments, as it meant sitting in a small microscope room with the mixed nasty smells for hours at a time. Not many volunteers for that, fairly understandably. It also didn’t make us very popular with the neighbouring labs.
Mashed bananas, as in time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
Mouse pee.
’Nuf said.
When I was a palaeontologist, I worked a lot in the Natural History Museum. The palaeo dept had a smell – which I thought rather pleasant – of the gloopy adhesive used to stick fossils back together.
DTT. I love the smell of DTT in the morning.
Didn’t have you down as a glue sniffer, Henry !!
Luria broth and the like.
Also – that miasma that hangs around the autoclave, which I always presume to be mostly caused by autoclaved media.
And what’s that stuff we used to use for sticking bits of broken gel boxes back together? Some nasty organic solvent, but I can’t remember the name now.
I remember when the walk-in cooler broke down the hall from the lab where I did my grad school research. The marine mammals group had a whale in there. For a while, folks didn’t notice that the cooler was broken. Then they opened the door.
The marine mammals group had a whale in there.
Did anyone else have to read this sentence more than once?
Mmmmmmm rotting whale.
Also – not really a “lab smell” I suppose, but a certain person to whom I am married used to
complain aboutremark upon the smell of latex gloves that was perpetually on my hands, back in the days when I actually did benchwork.Didn’t have you down as a glue sniffer, Henry
Here’s a tale from when I was briefly in the field in Kenya in 1998.
Fossil bones only partially excavated from the ground (grain by grain, with dental picks – it takes a long time) are coated with a consolidant so they don’t split on exposure to heat, air and light.
If you leave them overnight, though, you have to protect the fossil bones with cairns of rocks.
This is to keep the hyenas away.
Hyenas make short work of bones, of course, and they LOVE the smell and taste of the consolidant. I swear I’m not making this up.
TEMED, very unpleasant
Elisabeth – YES! How could I forget something I work with almost every day. It is really awful.
Henry – in this country, porcupines will happily eat things like cedar paneling or plywood, mainly for the adhesives used to hold them together (they can get the wood just about anywhere). They also chew up axe handles, canoe paddles, and the like, for the salt left from sweaty hands.
I thought you were going to say that hyenas have such sensitive noses that they can smell that the fossils are bones. Hm, if bits of collagen can be found in T. rex and hadrosaur fossils, maybe that’s not so far-fetched an idea…