Question: what basic equipment and and methods do you use for a normal biology, physics , chemistry lesson?

Luke Williams answered on 19 Jun 2016:

For lessons? I suppose I could take my undergraduate degree level, as Laura has pretty much covered school, and Robert his work. I don’t recall many experiments in any of my school lessons anyhow; an occasional practical in chemistry A level perhaps. There was that time I dropped a mercury thermometer roughly ten minutes after being told explicitly that dropping them was a bad idea… *ahem*

My degree also had very few practicals – approximately six afternoons of chemistry practicals in first year. We were introduced to the major analytical themes of chemistry, so we looked at UV light, Infrared, NMR and I believe Mass Spectrometry too, but my memory is a little fuzzy. The UV light is because some chemicals will absorb the right light, IR because certain chemical bonds will move and stretch when hit with IR light, and this can be read. NMR is another key method to look at what atoms are attached to which other atoms, and MS allows you to see the mass of your compound. Typically we would be asked to make something or identify something. All these pieces of equipment are generally quite large and expensive, and even with a large group of students we would be either borrowing them or going to use a communal piece of equipment that the whole department would be using.

I do recall we had access to typical things in a chemistry lab such as working in fume hoods (for safety), liquid nitrogen and dry ice (solid carbon dioxide, both for cooling things down). We also used a fair amount of glassware such as conical and round bottom flasks, but I can’t recall exactly what we used. The rest was pretty similar to a school setting I think.

In second year I spent a week attached to a PhD student along with a small group of friends, and our group in particular used a sonicator, which looks a bit like an upside metal cone in a cupboard. It emits a very high shriek, or ultrasound, which we used to essentially shatter cells.

Third year I don’t recall any experimental work, and fourth year had my research project. I did my project under another PhD student in an underground lab with an attached pilot plant. As I worked on the border between science and engineering I was lucky to work with some high tech equipment such as a 96 well plate reader, which was able to read plates of 96 small wells, holding just 0.2ml in each. I put small samples of cells and cell media (liquid with cells removed) to analyse them. Another highlight was being able to work in the pilot plant – I was able to do two runs on a 40L scale bioreactor.

Hope this helps.