According to the NIH director, early-career researchers in the biomedical sciences currently face the worst financial environment of the past half century. Thus, the cost-effective use of start-up packages is extremely important. Here, we present our experience from the past year in setting up a new low-cost fly lab in Canada.
General strategies: Be creative; traditional purchasing techniques are not the most cost-effective.
1) Ask the experts in your department for used items: incubators, microscopes and Petri dishes. Collaborate with facility managers who know about abandoned equipment. Having certain items manufactured at a local machine shop saves money. Our custom fly pads―which are bigger than commercial fly pads―were made in this fashion, at a similar cost.
2) Take advantage of sales that vendors offer to new investigators.
3) Buy scientific supplies at non-scientific stores. Amazon.com, eBay, and dollar stores offer similar supplies for a lower price
4) Sign up for a lab account with vendors and don’t forget to negotiate before you regularly order in bulk. Vendors usually offer a lower price than what they advertise. Below are strategies we followed to establish four fly stations and one fly cooking room and a description of how we saved money maintaining twelve trays of stock fly lines with weekly experiments at a low cost.
Equipment:
1) Use websites such as LABx.com for trading used items. There, cheap equipment can be purchased on sale.
2) Browse Amazon.com for cooking room supplies (oven plate, pots, spoons, scoops and strainers), fly station materials (tubing, connectors, paintbrushes and spatulas), general lab equipment (carts and bag holders), and immunostaining items (glass well dishes, Pyrex dishes, micro scissors, and tweezers).
3) Organizers, containers, and storage boxes can be purchased at dollar stores and department stores. For example, purchasing gooseneck lamps from IKEA instead of a vendor’s microscope lighting will save 200 CAD per unit.
Consumables:
1) Most fly-food ingredients can be found at a local grocery or bulk food store.
2) Vials, bottles and plugs should be negotiated as regular bulk orders for a discount with sales representatives. For small-scale and short-term use, for example, cotton balls from Amazon.com fulfill the same purpose as conventional plugs.
In summary, by setting up a fly lab using these cost-effective methods, new researchers can obtain supplies of equal or higher quality. We saved 2,500 CAD per fly station and 1,000 CAD on the cooking room compared to purchasing from conventional vendors. A further 20,000 CAD per year is saved on consumables (vials, food, bottles, plugs) for maintaining and experimenting with flies. Don’t let your money fly away.