Eliminating 6 Months of Trial and Error at the Lab

Written by Phil Meagher | Dec 20, 2013 5:00:00 AM

In Alaska, learning scientific techniques through video demonstrations pays off and results in 3 new grants.

Problem: Each year, the Drew Lab at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks faces the same problem: student turnover.

“We’re always doing new experiments, specifically perfusion treatments that require heart access,” says Jeanette Moore, a researcher and lab manager at the Drew Lab, “Since the people who do these experiments are students, they will pick up a project and graduate. A few years later someone wants to do that experiment again, but the instructor is gone.”

“Scientists are constantly struggling to find someone to help them and often not finding anyone," says Moore, "Being in Alaska, and relying only on the expertise of our staff, we’re limited in what we can do.” In this image, a research from the Drew Lab demonstrates a technique they published in JoVE.

Training new students at the Drew Lab can be expensive. And being located in Alaska, traveling to far-away labs to learn techniques is sometimes out of the question—leaving the team with no choice but to learn procedures they need via text-based science journals.

It can be a costly reality, as repeating these experiments in an effort to get them right often involves using expensive laboratory animals, antibodies and reagents.

Implementation: “Sometimes you’re reading directions, and the words just don’t make sense,” says Moore, referring to the challenge of learning laboratory techniques from text, “That is the value of JoVE, actually seeing how to insert a needle in a laboratory animal before you do it so you don’t have to do it twice.”

Recently, Moore and the students at the Drew lab have been using JoVE’s 2,500+ scientific videos in order to better familiarize themselves with novel research from labs across the globe. They use JoVE’s video demonstrations to expand their skill set at the bench and to develop novel applications of these methods for their own research.

Results: According to Moore,

The Drew Lab has saved thousands of dollars on the expensive cFos, GAD67 and tyrosine hydroxylase. “Instead of trying to learn a technique from the literature for six months, new researchers can master the method in a few days,” says Moore. “As such, everything is streamlined with JoVE. We use fewer expensive antibodies in our research.”
“We learn the techniques faster so we use fewer animals.”
“You reduce the drugs you use on the animals.”
“And you get publishable results.”

Since incorporating JoVE videos in their lab, the Drew Labs has received three new grants and is in the process of publishing neuroscience research. They’ve also applied to NIH grant RO3 because of research achieved with JoVE.

An image taken from the Drew Lab's JoVE video, Growth and Differentiation of Adult Hippocampal Arctic Ground Squirrel Neural Stem Cells.

Does your lab use JoVE? Let us know how in a comment below for a chance to be featured on the JoVE blog. For more information on publishing with JoVE, click here.

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