March 17, 2016 at 04:55AM

Today I Learned: 1) ATc (a chemical inducer used to turn on genes under the pTet promoter and related promoters) is toxic to bacteria in a dose-dependent fashion when used in concentrations higher than about 200 µg/ml. This really shouldn't be surprising, since it's a chemical analogue of tetracycline, which is an antibiotic, but it's still good to know. 2) ...that there's a second VWR stockroom on campus! It has wares that overlap with the one I always use, but not completely. Notably, it has a wider variety of tubing, which I could use. There are also rumors of a third stockroom somewhere...? 3) I'm having difficulty finding information to corroborate this, but apparently there was an old game console controller that was designed to be plugged into a plant. It would read random electrical signals in the plant as input, letting you play video games against a plant. Andrey Shur, can you confirm the existence of this hardware?