A question for the microbiologists of the Fediverse:
How do you record data about your cultures and cultivation activities?
Are you using pen and paper? Spreadsheets? Some kind of custom-purpose software?
I'm thinking of data such as: species being cultured, substrate media being used, dates of transition between media, incubation temperatures, contamination events, sporulation events etc.
Boosts welcome.
@danwchan @glyph a few of us had setup lab notebooks at the Wyss Institute in Boston, MA based on mediawiki. ❤️
I would consider Googling for something newer if you go this route. But it can be very slick and many of us enjoyed it throughout grad school. #openscience
@wait_sasha thanks for sharing! I used pmwiki as my lab notebook in grad school. Now I think I'd use markdown files in Nextcloud.
@glyph pen and paper for all lab notes for me.
@glyph I manage a BSL2 lab. Note taking is an issue for sure. We want to ensure not contaminating our computers or phones. Our facility safety protocols say that none of those devices get used in the lab space. This is completely not practical, so we do use them but carefully & wipe them down a lot.
I personally do not want my laptop at the bench, so this means I keep a rough nonofficial paper (thus "dirty") notebook and transfer my notes to the laptop. Different excel file per experiment.
@glyph this wasn't what I had in mind when I heard you could learn about different cultures on fedi
@glyph Typically I would be taking bacteria from the freezer and growing them for study under the same set conditions, finding those initial conditions first based on whatever produced the phenotype in question. I like pen and paper notes that I later transfer into a simple wiki but at my best I write the plan on the wiki before I begin with only mods/data transferred over later from the pen and paper scratch.