(from the archives)
Once upon a time, we made the necessary chemicals from scratch to purify DNA from bacterial cultures. These days, for a couple of dollars, you can get all the reagents you need all packaged in a nice box - these things are called commercial "kits".
You may ask, why do you use these kits - Is it laziness? or consistent results? A combination of these answers I guess. In the end those that never made the reagents from scratch are less likely to understand how the procedure worked, and how to trouble-shoot when the procedure fails. The latest kit (from Qiagen) had this flyer and instruction booklet (pic left). But if you read the flyer closely this is what you'll notice:
This is clearly a new all time low in kits. A kit for systems biologists?? ... it's as if the kit's label should have read: "Are you a String-Theorist and want to jump into biology? Well we have the kit for you! Use our NEW AND IMPROVED kit and you'll get your DNA faster than ever (and thought-free too). Now even a clueless Physicist can purify DNA without thinking about how this stuff actually works!". The sad thing is that the kit is EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE OLD KIT, except for some blue dye that helps to evaluate if your bacteria have lysed. But Qiagen really wants us to believe that this kit is NEW AND IMPROVED, and so they added this sentence to the cover of their NEW instruction booklet:
To all those Systems Biologists ... have fun with your blue kits!
{Disclaimer} Just in case Qiagen gets pissed with this entry - I do use Qiagen kits to purify DNA, so yes they are a pretty good kit - however the new marketting strategy is just too much.
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I got "new" kit down at our University's central services store.... Blue dye=systems-ready......
I still use my own reagents for the alkaline lysis (ABC) miniprep- but have been known on occasion to go qiagen out of sheer lazyness....
Everyone is ripping on kits these days to prove how "old-school" they are. Look, you're no Jacob Monod just because you make your own alkaline lysis buffers. You're not a good scientist because you can isolate more DNA per cell than the other guy, you're a good scientist because you can answer important questions quickly and definitively.
Spending time optimizing your particular DNA isolation technique, or any technique for which there already exist established methods, is time taken away from doing real science. If you don't understand how the technique works, it doesn't take long to study the procedure and figure it out. If you still can't understand how the technique works, then you should find another line of work. Sure there are some crappy kits out there, but for most applications, they work fine. A high percentage of complaints about kits comes from people whose technique is shoddy to start with, anyways.
I think that the more brainless it is, the better, because it frees people up to think more about real scientific questions, rather than how to optimize their particular DNA extraction technique.
I mean, really, we should be past this by now. Lysis is one of the most important steps, so any help with that is appreciated. I've got one of those guys in my lab, and his "re-invent the wheel" fetish constantly bewilders me.
This post seemed to come across as mildly "anti-kit."
Are you really suggesting that using a "kit" as a biologist should be something we should be ashamed of? I can't imagine how increasing efficiency and allowing time for more important tasks could be construed as a bad thing.
On the other hand, yes, this sounds like a bad kit. So be it.
Grady and Trevor,
Actually Qiagen's kit is one of the best. It's the marketting, that is ... so funny. The kit was idiot proof to begin with. But now the hot field in biology is Systems Biology - and so (I'm guessing) the marketting division felt that they had to associate the "new and improved kit" by making it a "Systems Biology" kit. And how did they addapt the kit for Systems Biology? by adding a blue dye. Now if that doesn't sound pathetic, I don't know what does.
PS Grady, do you work for Qiagen?
No, I don't work for Qiagen. I actually think their kits are kinda crappy, and I use the nucleospin kits made by Macherey-Nagel(who I don't work for either). I just have this guy in my lab that I have nicknamed Old School, because of his hang-up with doing everything by hand.
There are also the people who are disdainful of statistical methods, viewing them as simply a way of lying about data. I think that says more about them and their understanding of statistics than it does about the majority of the people who use statistical methods.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it's more about feeling superior than it is about turning out good science. In their defence, it's not totally without justification, but they just take it a bit too far, and that's what sparked this rant.
You've seen this phenomenon happen, in lab meetings, haven't you? Someone wants to look important, but they don't totally understand what's being talked about, so they pick some trivial point and start harping on it, or they criticize some method for not being totally "rigorous". I mean, what does that really mean? It's supposed to sound like you're criticizing someone for not being a careful, experienced scientist, but it's really just meaningless noise designed to get people looking at you, right?
There are admittedly some crappy and pathetic kits out there, just as there is some pathetic work coming from people who would idenitfy themselves as systems biologists. But knee-jerk disdain for "kits", and the people who use them, is just as bad as blanket acceptance.
We're all smart people, or we wouldn't be doing what we do. I know that we're capable of taking a more nuanced view that incorporates "fitness for a particular purpose".
The blue dye scared the crap out of me the first time I did it - we usually just mix and match reagents, so I was doing a miniprep, and I was like "that's not suppossed to happen!" Fortunately someone else knew why it was blue. :)
That said, the blue thing is kind of cool.
There's another point, Grady: for many PI's who are not HHMI, money is tight. Hell, some of us even feel that since we're living off of a tax subsidy, we should, you know, stretch our federal grant money as far as possible! (It's called fiduciary responsibility.) And the amazing thing is that when you use a kit, you often don't even save much time. We use Quiagen when we need clean DNA, and we use the TELT method for most analytical minipreps. It's no slower, it's clean enough, and it costs ~20% of what Quiagen does. I make a batch of the reagents and they last me for something like two YEARS of work.