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Winter is upon us and we’re getting into the holiday spirit here at Addgene. We’ve adorned our walls with snowflakes, put out some hot chocolate, and added some winter cheer to the lab.

Now it’s your turn! Show us your lab holiday decorations by participating in our annual #DeckTheLab contest. Get creative and build a pipette tip tree or go all out and create a massive wall mural. Snap a photo of your lab holiday decor and tag it with #DeckTheLab and @Addgene. This year, we’re opening up the contest to Twitter and Instagram.

Can you imagine how much space a million plasmids would fill? Two weeks ago, Addgene edged passed our one million plasmids shared milestone by ending the day with 1,000,002 plasmids shipped. Reaching one million plasmids shared might have you wondering how many plasmids leave Addgene headquarters every day. That would be an average of 673 plasmids each day. This requires tremendous coordination amongst the lab team, shipping team, and others to ensure that everything will ship out in time - from assembling the boxes, to inoculating tubes, and to packing and shipping. Every single day.

In this episode of the Addgene podcast, we sit down with Addgene’s Founders - Melina Fan, Ken Fan, and Benjie Chen. We learn what it was like to get Addgene off the ground and what the founders hope to see in the repository’s future. If you’ve ever been curious about what it takes to start your own nonprofit, this is the episode for you.

If you’re doing high throughput work, it’s likely that you come into the lab wishing there was a machine that could make your life a hundred times easier. We’ve certainly felt this way at Addgene so we’ve been putting some work into finding robots that’ll take a little labor off our hands.

Good news! There is probably a machine or robot out there that does exactly what you want plus way more than you thought it could ever do! However, there is quite a bit of upfront research you have to do to find said robot and to find out how you can get one. As a starting point, I would recommend conferences like Lab Robotic Interest Group (LRIG). There is so much to see and so many more robots than you ever knew existed!

As a tech at Addgene, part of my job, in addition to preparing DNA and generating/replenishing kits, is to find new ways to make lab processes more efficient. Being in the Boston area, we get many opportunities to learn from other biotech companies at workshops and can use what we learn to improve processes in the Addgene lab. In this post, I’ll tell you a little bit about what I learned from a New England Biolabs (NEB) hosted workshop at Lab Central and discuss why these types of workshops could be useful to anyone working in a lab.