This stinks
How to tactfully remind my otherwise lovely labmate that the smell of beta-mercaptoethanol makes me highly nauseous? I think he knows, but since no one else seems to be adversely affected by this foul chemical, it’s easy to forget.
The thing about beta-mercap is that the smell can linger for hours even in tiny residual droplets from a spent pipette tip. So I just went through his trash trying to find anything smelly and purple, but drew a blank. Next, I took off my lab coat and swirled it around my head for about a minute trying to circulate the smell away from my bench – in vain.
Plan C: a coffee in the office while I wait for my stomach to settle and for diffusion to do its thing.
Walk into the lab with a peg on your nose?
Yep. Beta-merc stinks – it’s that touch of rotting fish that does it for me. Was it SDS-PAGE? Did your labmate add TEMED to spice things up?
Interestingly, I don’t mind TEMED so much. It’s not the fishiness that gets me – there is something about the odor than makes me feel violently ill, but I can’t quite get what it is.
DTT, on the other hand, makes me salivate. It’s such a lovely smell…
That’s the first time I’ve seen “DTT” and “salivate” in the same sentence! Personally, TEMED makes me nervous. Must be a Pavlovian response or something.
Were you flogged with dead herring as a child? 😉
No, but I’ve had a bunch of awful gels on my watch 🙂
I had a Greek lab mate who used to say that 2-ME made him feel hungry.
I personally hate it, but my worst enemy is TEMED, which I *really* despise, probably since a project student of mine managed to tip over a bottle (with an incorrectly secured lid) on route to the fume hood. That was nasty.
On the other hand, I’ve worked with S. aureus for the better part of a decade, and I’ve learnt to quite enjoy the sweet (literally) smell, even though to newcomers they smell like a tramp’s armpit 😉
Is S. aureus the one that’s supposed to smell like grapes?
I don’t mind TEMED at all, which is very strange because I know, logically, it should be a highly objectionable odor. Perhaps I am missing a few receptors?
The thing I find the most disgusting at all is the scent of cell cultures. Have you ever sniffed a tissue culture dish full of cells? It smells, very disturbingly, of flesh. Of course that’s not really surprising, but it gives me the willies.
You know, I hadn’t made that connection before. Shiver.
I quite like DTT. Wouldn’t say it makes me salivate but I do find it quite pleasant. TEMED is stinky, but not unpleasantly so.
Jenny, I can’t say I’ve ever snorted cells, but I do quite enjoy the plastic-y/DMEM-y smell, and of course I adore 70% ethanol…
lol, Staph look like bunches of grapes, but I certainly wouldn’t make wine out of grapes that smell like Staph 😉
We use quite a lot of alkane-thiols in our lab (don’t ask), so there is always a slight sulphurous hint in the air. A colleague of mine made the mistake of taking an (unopened) bottle of methylmercaptan out of its external tin, to check its density. He figured it didn’t need to be in the fumehood seeing as the bottle wasn’t open.
Wrong. Cue smelliest substance known to man doing what it is that the smelliest substance known to man does to earn this accolade.
Smelly lab/corridor/building for several hours.
On another note, while we’re entering the truly fetish world of enjoyable sciency smells, I love the smell of the bio-rad SDS-Page tank after just rinsing away the running buffer. I’m not sure what the smell is (I use glycine containing buffers), but it really smells ‘fresh’.
Next time I run an SDS-PAGE I’ll be sure to sniff.
Jim, sounds like you’d be the perfect person to write a humorous piece on LabLit.com about lab smells…get in touch on editorial[at]lablit.com if you’re interested!
I keep having the same issues with SDS PAGE. Someone keeps doing them out in the open. Apparently it (BME) doesn’t bother them.
Isn’t this against safety protocols to use BME out in the open lab air?
Yeah, it’s against the rules, but since when has that stopped anyone?
i quite like the smell…