Category: Uncategorized

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Spambots Create Hell on Earth

Please do not be offended if your carefully crafted comment has been deleted! Spambots broke in and left several thousand comments scattered everywhere. The only realistic strategy was to remove all comments, the bloggish equivalent of destroying the village to save it.

I have since implemented several security measures, including moving the blog from the now defunct Pixie to the much more robust and secure WordPress engine, and hope never to see such barbarism here again. Sincerest apologies to humans who have visited and left their thoughts. May you live in peace and tranquility and never be ravaged by eVandals.

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Doubling-Time Calculator

Folks in the lab have recently been calculating doubling times of strains.  I found doing the calculations one at a time tedious, so I put together a spreadsheet to automatically handle the data from the Biotek plate reader in batch.

I probably spent a totally unreasonable amount of time putting this together, but hopefully someone will find it useful.  It is particularly optimized to work with the raw data as it is spit out into Excel by the KC4 program.  It is optimized to work with the scales of data that I get out (48 hour growth, final OD ~0.8), but you should be able to easily modify the settings to work better for your data.

To start, you simply copy the raw data from your Excel worksheet to the worksheet in the calculator helpfully named “Raw Data”.

There’s a lot going on in there, so if you need something and can’t find it, then track me down, because it is probably hidden somewhere in there.  Alternatively, you can start unhiding rows and try to disentangle the works yourself…

Good luck!

Doug

Get Doubling Time Calculator
DTC