What’s your role and research area?
Molly: I’m a third year DPhil student. I look at immune responses to retinal gene therapy primarily.
Sylvia: I’m a second year DPhil student, working on optimizing gene therapies for rhodopsin, which is a protein in the rod photoreceptor cells in the retina, and also trying to make stem cell models of the retina that we can test them on. I'm trying to develop our own in-house retina organoid.
There are a lot of places in the lab that you can optimize activity to use and waste less, and it's definitely a good thing.
How did the big lab clear-up come about?
Molly: I've been in this lab for four years now and in that time, we've moved lab rooms within the building. We moved with a lot of clutter and it felt like it was just getting in the way of the smoothness of work flows and navigating the lab.
Sylvia: We're a fairly big lab, and that of ends up with a high turnover of DPhils. We also have rotating medicine students that come in, so a lot of the time it is good practice to keep stuff as long as possible. That's very important in science - don’t throw someone's data away. But at the same time, the problem is someone’s name is on a box and you don't know who they are, so you don't throw it away and you accumulate a lot of stuff.
How was it getting in the way of your work?
Sylvia: I was trying to take images of whole retinal organoids, which themselves were expensive, then the cost of booking the microscope was about £700. It was five or six days of work incubating them from different antibodies, and then I have to mount and image them. I realised that the thing that was ruining my images was just one piece of dust in my mounting media every time. So I took thousands of pounds worth of images and some of them were barely useful just because there was dust in the air in the lab!
And then do you end up buying more?
Sylvia: Yes. For example, the kits are really expensive and the problem was that everyone felt they couldn't trust them because no one knew who they belonged to or how old they were. Every time anyone wanted to do something serious, they would just buy another one. This is a lot of extra waste, either because you use something and your experiment doesn't work, so you repeat it over again, or because you think, ‘I don't really trust that box’ and then you just buy a fresh one, when for all you know that box could have been bought last month.
Molly: You end up tripling the number of these things unnecessarily, which is incredibly wasteful.
Sylvia: We’ve kept all of the stuff in kits that wouldn’t have expired, for example some of the plasticware, so as not to throw that away. Reagents or the membrane columns, that do expire and would affect your experiment, we would throw away.
There's a lot of things in a lab that are hard to dispose of. Particularly like old IT or old machinery, but Maen and the Facilities team have been very helpful
Once you decided to clear things out how did it go?
Molly: We wanted to try and organise everything before the new DPhil students came this year so that they would learn to keep things clear and organised and then we can just start better habits for the future, because if it's set up from the start for new students then it's easier to keep it going.
Sylvia: Once we started, most people joined in. We started with the general spaces, but then for individual benches we organised a day where everyone would just come in and clean their own space. Now we have a cleaning rota, so two or three people do it once a month - changing the water in the water bath, checking on expiration dates of the communal buffers and gels and things like that. It’s good because we’ll pair a newer DPhil with somebody who has more experience and they learn how to do things.
Did you encounter any challenges?
Molly: There's a lot of things in a lab that are hard to dispose of. Particularly like old IT or old machinery, but Maen and the Facilities team have been very helpful in terms of helping us deal with all the stuff that we didn't know what to do with, and how to dispose of it responsibly.
How do you feel it's impacted your day-to-day work?
Molly: I think it just streamlines lab work. It makes everything a lot easier when you don't have to stress about things being expired or where to find things - they're all labelled on Sylvia's floor plan so you can always find things much more easily.
There are a lot of places in the lab that you can optimize activity to use and waste less, and it's definitely a good thing.
About LEAF:
The Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) is a sustainability standard designed to help research groups reduce their environmental impact. The scheme recognises all the great things you are already doing and provides a structure for planning your next steps. It covers equipment, space use, ventilation, procurement, waste, samples and chemicals.
In the past year, two research funders (Wellcome and Cancer Research UK) have announced a change in their eligibility requirements: wet-lab groups require “LEAF” certification.
Some individual labs in NDCN already have LEAF accreditation, but this year NDCN is applying for the silver accreditation as a whole department, with some labs going for gold!
The deadline for submission is 16 May (Silver) and 20 June (Gold).
There is only one accreditation window in 2025 – so get going!
Useful resources:
LEAF resources for labs: https://sustainability.admin.ox.ac.uk/lab-resources
To be kept informed about monthly LEAF meetings, please contact the Facilities Team to be added to the mailing list: facilities@ndcn.ox.ac.uk
Join the Virtual MS Teams based community of practice to access webinars and written resources.
Speak to your Lab Sustainability/LEAF rep.