I love all aspects of lab work even the litrature search and writing it up, before the start of the project I was beeming with enthusiasm since it's a relative new area of biomedical science with no concrete findings hoping perhaps to get a good results to supplement my excellent marks in my modules credits and perhaps maybe even get a publication things seemed to be looking up for a good MSc . Now I dread going to the lab since everything I am doing just does not seem to be working EVEN THE POSITIVE CONTROLS! no matter how hard I troubleshoot and it's soul destroying!!!! I get to the lab at 9 leave when i have to at 5 with nothing to show for my efforts i am scared now that I may have let my supervisor down who picked several candates ahead of me to do this project and worse still myself and family since It may cost me that distinction. I just set up another assay so hopefully I will get some readings.Has any other science student encountered the same problem??????

what type of ecperiments are you doing? What are the positive controls? PCR? Western blotting? Someone here may be able to give you some suggestions

*experiments

I had a similar experience during my undergrad. If you haven't already you need to raise the issue with your supervisor and make it clear no matter what you do the experiment just doesn't work.

My project is about nanoparticle potentiol as an alternative adjuvant for vaccines. I want to see if they can induce nitric oxide generation using murine J774a1 MURINE macrophages using the griess reaction assay. My positive controls are the treatement with the macrophages with bacterial LPS of salmonella typhimurium I do get readings for it but it's painfully low but I do know now that these nanoparticles do not induce this factor it just makes it difficult when I have no positive control for comparision!