Prof. Maya Schuldiner

Entrance to Meyer Building

Singer Colony Arrayer Robot

Tissue Culture Room

This is our lab's tissue culture room where we can follow up on cool findings that we have in yeast to see if they are evolutionarily conserved

Maya Schuldiner's Lab

Weizmann Institute of Science

The Peroxi team bay

If you want your head to be blown up by terms like beta-oxidation, co-localization and compartmentalization, you are more than welcome to come sit with us :) We study a mysterious and important compartment in the cell called the Peroxisome

Eden's bird feeder

A kind birthday gift from the Schuldiner lab, designed in Eden's favorite boho-chic style. You may ask why would Eden need a bird's feeder? Well, it's not for birds. Its for Eden, who is constantly eating little snacks ;). More importantly, we make it a point to prepare a special gift for every birthday to show each other how much we care

Analysis computer

This computer is reserved for long and difficult computational analysis tasks such as analyzing thousands of images to mine for interesting changes. Thanks to it, we can work on multiple things at once

-80 freezer

These extra cold freezers are cold enough to cryopreserve live cells! Here is where we keep all of our yeast strains and also other biological samples

Plastic recycling bin

Recycling and "green living" is very important to our lab

Robotic system

Supply closet

With so many people working in high throughput, a lot of room for supplies and glassware is needed. Here we also keep our liquid growth media

Confocal microscope

Vending machine

This machine helps to keep hungry scientists focused during late night work

Drying rack

No one likes to do the dishes, but even scientists have to clean up the mess they make and dry the cleaned materials in these dedicated racks

Peroxi what???

Happy holidays

Our lab is very diverse and we love having people from all nationalities, religions and backgrounds - it makes life so much more interesting! Of coursre, we are also happy to celebrate any holiday as long as food and alchohol are involved....

Reagent closet

A lot of different reagents are needed to prepare the growth media and other solutions for our experiments. First the reagents are sorted by the storage condition (freezer or room temperature) and then arranged alpabetically. Order is important in lab work!

Welcome to our lab!

We come from all over the world but we all share a passion to uncover the secrets of cells...?????? ?????, ????? ??????????!, Herzlich willkommen!, ????? ???????? , Bem-vindo, Mer?ba!, Welcome!

Reagent kits

Some reagents for routine tasks come ready-made in special sets called kits. Here we have reagent kits for purification of DNA from bacteria, yeast and other sources.

Pipettes

Pipettes are perhaps the most important instruments for a lab biologist. They are used to handle liquids in volumes ranging from 1 ml to as small is 1 microliter (1/1000 of ml).

Fume hood

Most of the reagents we work with are harmless. But some need special care, so we operate with them in this special space called the fume hood, where all the air is sucked inside to a filter so that the reagent vapors can't escape to the lab and reach the person working with it. Keeping safe is always our top priority!

Microwave

Yes, this is an absolutely regular microwave oven. We use it to boil some solutions, for example to make agarose gels to visualise DNA. No food allowed in this microwave!

Ready solutions

Some commonly used solutions are prepared in advance. Every lab member is responsible for making one or two solutions thus dividing the labor and helping each other.

Postcards

When traveling to another country to visit a collegue or attend a conference don't forget to send a postcard to your labmates!

Toad eyes

A souvenir from our departmental Purim contume competition. The whole lab dressed up - each as a different model organism and we won first place! and a Karaoke machine.

Shaking incubators

Each organism feels cozy in a different temprature. These are two incubators that we use for culturing yeast (at 30 degrees) or bacteria (at 37 degrees) in liquid media. They must be very reliable to provide stable temperature and rapidly shake the flasks 24/7

Protein seperation station

This little corner of the lab in where we seperate proteins which we extract from yeast cells or human cells to detect and quantify the specific proteins that we study.

Yoga mat

To keep our mind sharp, we take a few minutes each day for excersize. We even kept excersizing during the Corona lockdown on Zoom. We can now plank for over 3 minutes!!

Colorful stickers

These are special colorful stickers which we use to mark and tag our test tubes. They survive in a wide range of tempratures, and can be used even at -80 degrees celcius. they also stay stuck to the tube when centrifuging at high speed. Why so many colors - we can barcode our samples with them or just make our day a bit more fun.

Lab language

One favorite hebrew expression is '??? ?????' ('Kol Hakavod!', Bravo!) but there are many more positive expressions in the hebrew language. Except for that, we speak english in the lab - unless, of course, we want to learn something funny from a collegue that comes from one of the different countries represented in the lab.

Trophies from emptied tip boxes

Screening for the function of unknown proteins means testing thousands of different genes in baker`s yeast! This takes up a lot of tips....

Technical support

Hi Amir, thank you for your help with the flurorescent screens. Amir is our robotics Guru!

Plate recycling

Taking care of our planet is important to us. Therefore, we like to clean and re-use the plates of our screens to reduce plastic waste.

Belly dancer

When ever some solutions require gentle, continuous agitation or mixing we put it on the belly dancer- a tray that moves in orbital movments- carfull it can be hypnotizing..

Pertri dish

We grow our yeast in Petri dishes , these are plates that contain agar (a Jell-o type substance) supplemented with yeast gourmet food. Sometimes we challange the yeast and change the composition of the agar, to learn how they cope with unexpected downgrade of the menu.

Lucky charms

In the Schuldiner lab we put our trust in science but also a little bit on luck in different flavours - just to be on the safe side....

Beer machine

This is a kit we use for preparing our own lab beer! It always comes out very successful and tasty - good thing that we know a thing or two about yeast....

PCR machine

This machine allows us to do a Polymerase chain reaction or PCR. In this assay, we take a very small amount of genetic material (DNA) and amplify it until we get billions of copies of it. This allows us to study this DNA in detail, to learn about its sequence and mutations. Oh, and we can even genetically modify our yeast using this DNA.

Emergency shower

In case you spill a nasty chemical on yourself, take an emergency shower right in the corridor! But better be careful!

Velvet rags

These little pieces of cloth are important "instruments" in yeast research. We use them to transfer yeast colonies from one agar plate to another.

DNA separation station

In this corner of the lab we perform agarose gel electrophoresis to separate bits of genetic material, DNA, by size and visualize them.

Fluorescent scanner

This instrument, a bit bigger than a regular scanner, allows us to visualize tiny quantities of fluorescently labeled proteins to analyze their concentration in the cells.

The big centrifuge

Centrifuges are used to spin suspensions very quickly to separate things according to their weight - heavy things are pulled down quickly and light things stay above. We use this one to collect large quantities of yeast cells from the liquid that they were growing in.

Small centrifuge

Centrifuges (See also our "big centrifuge" for more explanations) are used to spin suspensions very quickly to separate a heavy pellet from the light solution. This is a small centrifuge for small tubes.

Incubator for plates

Sometimes we grow yeast cells in plates with multiple tiny wells containing liquid media. This incubator maintains confortable growth temperature and slightly shakes the plates.

Small incubator

Because you can never have too many incubators!

Thermoblocks

These massive metal blocks maintain constant temperature to incubate small tubes (fit in holes) for different reactions.

The Janus room

This is our first highthrouput screening system (the second one is now in another room and you can find it under the tag "Robotic System") - we all call it Janus! It can grow our cells, transfer them between different plates and even pick individual yeast strains, and image them all with the microscope. Go ahead and have a 360 view of the room

A drawer

This may just look like a normal drawer, however it somehow provides for perfect romantic conditions for our yeast to, well...mate. Yes yeast also have two sexes! By mating yeast from opposite mating types we can combine 2 features that we want to study!

Liquid nitrogen dewar

This is a dewar (a very fancy flask) for holding very cold liquids like liquid nitrogen (N2). It is really super cold: -160 ?C . We use liquid N2 to quickly freeze some of our samples. If your finger goes in it would freeze in an instand - be really careful!

A big fridge

This giant fridge is used to store fresh agar plates and agar plates with yeast growing on them. We have so many plates that we need a few of these big fridges and a number of small ones.

Magnetic stirrers and hot plates

These are little lab stoves that also mix your stuff themselves (would love to have one on a kitchen at home?). How does it stir? A small maget is put into a flask with your solution and the rotating magnet inside the hotplate makes the magnet in the flask spin - easy!

Biohazard trash

We don't work with anything hazardous in the lab, but still all the consumables that touched living organisms (yeast or bacteria) are disposed in these special buckets that have special trash bags. The bags are sealed and sterilized before they are thrown away.

Sharp object disposal

Sharp objects can't go into the regular trash bags because they can pierce the bags. Such objects are disposed using special sturdy protective containers. We want to make sure not to hurt anyone...

That's just a printer

But we try to be environmentaly friendly and collect scrap paper for reuse and recycling

Vortex

In the lab we have a lot of machines that perform trivial tasks. The vortex mixes solutions in tubes very rigourosly. Very handy when you have tons of tubes to mix!

Mini-centrifuge

This toy-like object is not a tiny space-ship....It is, in fact, a very small centrifuges for quick spins of very small tubes.

Fridge

Sometimes we dream that our fridges are full, not with yeast on Petri dishes, but with other yeast products that are more consumable for humans. That is why we have to put such a reminder on the door.

Mini-photometer

This instrument shines a light through a solution and measures how much light was absorbed. We use it to determine how many live yeast are growing in our liquid media.