This is where the magic happens. This is my lab bench. It’s been my bench since 2009. Before that, I worked in the lab next door. Before that, I worked in the lab I’m in now but on the bench to the right of this one (the other side of a freezer and a door). Before that, I was on the end of a tiny bench, making do with not much space, but only for a few months.

To the left of my bench is a Ph.D student and behind me is our technician. To my right is a freezer - a normal, domestic one - containing all my frozen samples for storage and the lab’s general supply of chemicals that need to be kept frozen, like enzymes. Next to that is the door to the teaching block and then the place we hang out coats.

Top Shelf (from left)

First we have two Windogradsky Columns, made in Feb 2006 using sediment from the Colne Estuary, Essex mixed with seawater from the L4 Sampling Station off the coast of Plymouth and spiked with powdered chalk, potassium sulfate, a piece of scrap A4 paper torn into shreds and some crab chitin. It’s been going for over 5 years now and is a beautiful example of Cyanobacteria, Purple sulfur Bacteria, Purple non-sulfur Bacteria and Green sulfur Bacteria. They get dragged out once a year for the Second Year Microbiology lab class to have a look at - they used to make their own but now time is against them so they do other things instead.

Next are lots of boxes containing filtration apparatus, generously given to us by a friend who was closing down her lab. They’re not in the boxes any more - they’re all in use!

Second Shelf (from left)

First there are two boxes containing 25-mL volumetric flasks. There are about 200 of them in total and they are used when assaying thiosulfate or polythionates by the cyanolytic method. You need lots and lots of these flasks for those assays and I have lots and lots of them, which is good!

Then there are trays of scintillation vials for liquid scintillation counting - some have fluid in them already, waiting for use, but most are empty. There is foil on the ones that are full because the fluid degrades in sunlight, turning brown, which makes it give weird results in the counter. The fluid is a mixture of organic solvents and a fluorescent purple dye. When radiation his the big solvent molecules, it excites their electrons, which are passed on to the dye, which, becomes excited for a tiny, tiny period of time before the excited electron drops to ground state, emitting the excess energy as a photon of light. This allows us to convert radiation to light - one beta particle or alpha particle should, theoretically convert to one photon and these can easily be measured with a light detector, allowing us to count how radioactive samples are.

Third Shelf (from left)

First there are filters for harvesting Bacteria from cultures then my solutions and equipment for scanning electron microscopy, which includes red sticks of sealing wax, which you can just about see. Next are trace elements, microscopy stains and bottles of sterile culture media and metal stock solutions. In real labs, we just write on the glass with a marker - we don’t print nice neat labels like they do on TV - there just isn’t time to make things pretty.

Fourth Shelf (from left)

Sodium thiosulfate in two big white jars - this is the main energy source I use to grow my bugs and I also use it as a starting material to synthesise polythionates - which are in the jars next to these. Amongst these jars are auric chloride - one of few gold compounds and it’s used to kill my bugs in controls. Normally folk use mercuric chloride but some of my bugs resist it and give strange results but gold kills all of them very effectively. The little plastic bottles with green lids are water for molecular biology (ultraclean!) and then there’s the business card of a Romanian collaborator then trace element solutions in dark glass with green lids, then more polythionates, protein stains and an indium standard solution. In a lot of work I have metal analyses done by an external contractor. To ensure the data are accurate, I add a known amount of indium (not found in huge amounts in nature) and then when I get the results back, if only 50% of the indium could be found, I know I need to double all the other results because 50% of everything else was lost in the sample preparation too. Above this are the switches for the air conditioning and a network socket to the right, which doesn’t work.

Front of the yellow shelf, from left.

Stopclock on a magnet holding up a bit of paper with a medium recipe on it; another stopclock; my Gilson pipettes; my Biochemical Society membership card; a newspaper clipping and accompanying note from a friend to tell me about a new brand of gin and then the plug for the freezer to my right! Hanging underneath are rolls of yellow insulation tape (for labelling), masking and autoclave tape (has a dye in it that turns black when heated to the same temperature/pressure that things need to be in the autoclave to render them sterile). These are hanging from gas taps and water-fed vacuum pumps.

On the bench, from left

Just visible are metal cans in which glass pipettes are sterilised by baking in the oven repeatedly. Next to these are rows and rows of Universal bottles with 10× stock solutions of different substrates to grow my bugs on. Then there are some conical flasks with cultures in them, topped with foam bungs covered in aluminium foil or with a red rubber vaccine stopper, which you can inject through. I use these when working with gases or toxins that I wouldn’t want to escape. In front of these are my blue notebooks and adjacent are boxes with very accurate glass syringes for small volumes like 0.01mL and suchlike. At the back are some Petri dishes containing bright yellow agar - probably had thiosulfate and a pH indicator and turned yellow after the bugs made acid. The bench has a glass plate on it to give a flat, wipe-clean surface. It’s a piece of window-glass, nowt special. Behind it are a beaker for waste like tips and filters and a beaker with pens, loops, spatulas etc and two bottles of agar that can be remelted and poured when needed. Big bottle is trace elements solution (such a chore to make, this one, I do 2L at a time, which makes about 200L of culture medium). In front of that is a tray of respirometry flasks, needles and bungs, ready to take to the radioisotope lab.