February in tweets

Let’s take a look at what happened last month at PLab:

The core team has grown to seven members, so we need more bench space, especially because our instruments are space hogs. The BioTek MultiFlo now has its own home.

Hits from the lower animal model NPC screens will be validated in NPC patient cells. Nina has been using our high-content imager called the IXM to collect data on NPC patient cells.

Our Bus Dev advisor Laura Shawver, CEO of Cleave Biosciences, dropped by the lab to talk to us about the long journey from preclinical screening hit to IND candidate and beyond. As you can see from all the open laptops, we took copious notes.

Team Nematode in action at the BioSorter. So far they’ve been chugging along at a phenomenal rate of 10,000 library compounds per month.

Occassionally one of our HTS instruments gets indigestion. Our acoustic dispenser for transferring tiny volumes acted up. Thankfully the folks at Labcyte were on the case in no time, and so the Echo was only down for a few days.

Tom penned an awesome post that describes the mechanics of the fly screen for NPC. Posts like it are forthcoming for the worm and yeast screens for NPC.

February 28 was World Rare Disease Day. We added our voices to the chorus in what might be considered an unusual way — in the form of a science rap explainer. Watch the trailer for yourself to see the pedagogical power of hip hop and animation.

Onward to Spring!