In this two-part series, we sit down to talk with two senior graduate students, Ben Vincent and Niroshi Senaratne, from the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program at Harvard University to get the scoop on the ups and down of graduate student life. Senior graduate students can sometimes be elusive or have a certain mystique that makes them difficult to approach for the youngster just starting in the lab, but they are exactly the people you should talk to if ruminating the trials and tribulations of the modern PhD program. Don’t be fooled! Most senior graduate students are friendly and full of useful advice. Stay tuned for concrete advice on how to pick a lab and a project.

Listen to Part 2 Here!

This post was contributed by guest bloggers Keith Pardee and Alexander A. Green.

Zika Background

First identified in 1947 in Uganda, the Zika virus had received little attention and, for the most part, had been associated with low morbidity and mild symptoms. This changed in January with the report of an outbreak of the virus in Brazil that was correlated with greater rates of infection and rare, but severe, symptoms, including the development of fetal microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome. In response, the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency and called for the fast-tracked development of diagnostics. Mostly transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes (aegypti and albopictus) and, aided by international travel, the Zika virus is expected to expand into heavily populated regions of South, Central, and North America. Diagnostics will play an important role in helping to monitor and slow this spread until vaccine programs can be put in place to provide community protection.

Laboratory management software is not a requisite for a functioning lab, but it is for a scaleable lab. When you need to track the location, quality, growth, and legal status of thousands of plasmids a day, like we do at Addgene, pen and paper will fail you. The benefits of lab management software aren’t just limited to large volume facilities; it can be useful in academic labs where postdocs, students, and lab mates are coming and going frequently - an environment ripe for valuable work and materials to slip through the cracks.

In this post we’ll highlight some of the lessons we’ve learned over the years with the hope that our insights can help steer you in the right direction when writing your own software. None of this is gospel, but we think it's worth consideration.

Like graphing data, choosing controls, or mixing clear solutions—public speaking is skill that any scientist can learn.  Any time you give a science talk, you are also giving a job talk. Even if not being interviewed, there could always be a future boss in the room, so it is a good idea to start thinking about public speaking early and often. Two of my jobs have indirectly resulted from someone seeing me speak in a non-interview setting. There are many resources on self-promotion (how hard it is for some people, especially women), visibility (how to get it, especially if introverted ), and networking (how to get people to remember you). What better way to accomplish all of these things naturally than to give a dynamite presentation?  To that end, let’s chat about giving science talks and how to make them serve you well. The happy byproduct might just be a career opportunity.

Check out Joanne's Reddit AMA

This post was contributed by guest bloggers Marcelle Tuttle and Alex Chavez, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

Listen to Our Podcast Interview the Alex Chavez

Background on Cas9 Activators

CRISPR/Cas9 is an enormously plastic tool and has taken the scientific world by storm. While Cas9 has been most widely used to create specific edits in DNA, there has also been significant work on constructing Cas9 transcriptional activators. These constructs allow for the upregulation of essentially any gene by fusing mutants of Cas9 deficient in DNA cutting activity to a transcriptional activation domain (Fig 1).