Advancing molecular biology through open research
Once a month, McKnight Lab cancels its usual data-heavy meeting and asks everyone to bring something that went wrong instead. What started as a single postponed presentation has become the most productive hour on our calendar — and a quiet argument for how junior scientists should be trained.
At McKnight Lab, every new project begins with a single paper notebook that stays off the computer for two full weeks. Here is why this deliberate friction has become our most effective quality-control instrument — and what happened when we nearly abandoned it.
Every protocol that leaves our bench must pass a simple test: could a visiting undergraduate follow it start to finish without asking a single question? We explain why this 'two-week rule' has become the most quietly transformative practice in our lab.
We tracked the careers of every trainee who passed through McKnight Lab for a decade, asking which mentoring practices actually predicted their success. The results challenged our assumptions — and our incentive structure.
Our R01 was rejected twice before it was funded on the third submission. This is a candid breakdown of the reviewer comments, the revisions that mattered, the ones that didn't, and why persistence in the current NIH funding climate is a professional skill worth teaching.
After five years of experiments, a routine STR profile revealed that our workhorse cell line was not what the vial claimed. Here is how we diagnosed the problem, salvaged the project, and rebuilt our authentication protocols — with a checklist any lab can adopt.
We spent one semester tracking the energy use, plastic consumption, and waste output of our own laboratory, and the numbers were more sobering than we expected. This is a candid account of what we measured, what we changed, what we refused to change, and the checklist any US lab can start with this semester.
Molecular biology has spent a century optimizing a handful of model organisms while the vast majority of microbial life remained unstudied. As sequencing costs fall and resistance to existing drugs accelerates, non-model microbes are moving from curiosity to priority. Here is why the unglamorous organisms in dirt, sediment, and compost may be the most important samples in our field.
When we set out to reproduce one of our own published results, we expected a formality. Instead, we uncovered missing reagent lots, ambiguous methods, and passage numbers no one had written down. Here is what we learned — and a checklist any lab can use.
Academia runs on unwritten rules, and first-generation students are rarely handed the key. Lab members at McKnight Lab share what they wish someone had told them — from reading papers efficiently to asking a PI for time.
Behind every published figure sits a freezer that has never blinked. Here is how McKnight Lab organizes cryostorage, redundancy, and disaster recovery so that a single mechanical failure never erases years of work.
Choosing a PhD lab is one of the highest-stakes decisions of your scientific career, yet most applicants ask only surface-level questions. Drawing on candid conversations with current members and alumni, we offer five questions that cut through the brochure language.
What actually happens between a research idea and a published paper? We walk students through every stage of the experimental process at McKnight Lab, including the pilot assays, the troubleshooting sessions, and the failures that never make it into the final figures.
Open research is often framed as an ethical obligation, but the practical case is just as compelling. Here are five concrete habits — from preprinting to public code — that help American academic labs collaborate faster, get cited more, and compete for funding.