Today’s hilarious labwork fail

With the Thermomixer I borrowed from Genome Sciences, I was ready to test the PAXgene Tissue DNA Kit with one of my pre-treatment samples!

I first grabbed the histology block with 5 notches from the storage container. Note to self: wiggle the drawer as you pull it open! The histology blocks tend to get stuck.

Figure 1. Histology block with four tissues from pre-treatment sampling

Once I had the block, I needed to scrape no more than 20 mg, or 0.02 g of tissue out.

Figure 2. Weighed 0.02 g (20 mg) of tissue embedded in paraffin

Figure 3. Tissue samples in histology block after scraping out sample

I transferred the tissue from the weigh boat to a 2 mL tube. The next step was to add 1 mL of xylene to my sample. We usually use the Young lab’s xylene, so I went over to their fume hood. However, the only xylene bottle they had was actually a xylene waste bottle! I probably should have checked this myself instead of going from Sam’s word…whoops. Sam’s now ordering xylene, and I’ll have to put this process on hold once more.