Category Archives: Advice Provided

Dehydrated Culture Media used in “Media Fill”

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The Question posed on LinkedIn.

“Dehydrated Culture Media used in “Media Fill”. Does the powder specification need to be sterile (irradiated) or it can be sterilized by filtration (0.22µm) just after browth preparation in tank?”

My advice:

Your starting dehydrated media should meet your existing limits for raw materials with regards to microbial load.

If your standard procedure is to formulate your product in an ancillary room and sterile filter it on the way to the filling heads, then I would include this in your sterile media fill trials as it simulates your normal batch process.

A batch simulation with no interventions should demonstrate your filtration sterilises your “product”. Once that’s done, you can then incorporate interventions into your sterile media fill trials.

Storytelling in Science

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The Question posed on LinkedIn.

Many say storytelling in science is a great way to describe complex material in an understandable way for the masses. In this post, I will try to use an analogy to illustrate the complexity of a typical motile bacterial cell. Link to referenced article.

My advice:

Perhaps, as the blog suggested – write an abstract for Joe Public. As well as the article submitted to a journal, perhaps a press release or one page summary in very general terms as to what the study set out to do and what the conclusions were along with possible applications of the new knowledge (unless the study disproved something or was confirming another study).

TOC: At the beginning of a document or at the beginning of each section/chapter?

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The Question posed on LinkedIn.

“Somebody asked me why we continued placing the TOC, List of Figures, and List of Tables at the beginning of a document and not having one these at the beginning of each section/chapter.

Several years ago I released technical manuals using section-based TOCs and other lists. However, that was because Word 97 in my PC (Win 98) could not work with large documents. Once I had a powerful enough PC/Word combination, I never did it again.

I mostly update the TOC and the other lists doing Ctrl-A + F9, which brings up the “Update XXX” dialog box for each table. Since I use appendixes, this methods also generates dialog boxes for them as well. I realize that using TOCs and lists at the beginning of each section would make the updating process longer, as more dialog boxes would pop-up.

However, I now ask myself whether it would be advantageous to do such thing, and why. ”

My advice:

At the beginning of the document as it is easy to find. A sub TOC at the start or each chapter could be a bit more informative.

Word is very bad for formatting and tables, but it seems “everyone” besides the graphic design industry uses it or something similarly bad.