It's very interesting to hear other people's experiences and plans, hope to hear from additional people as well.
A nonprofit research lab close to me (where I volunteer to help maintain their NMR) has stayed open throughout the past weeks. When people bring them NMR samples, the sample tubes must be left outside the building. Staff disinfect the tubes with rubbing alcohol, then bring them inside and put them in the autosampler. There's no person to person contact and basically only one person enters the NMR room. As long as that person stays healthy, there's no need to do constant disinfection of keyboards etc.
This is how I'd like to proceed with reopening our lab, if I can make it stick in the department. I can't imagine a simpler and safer way to get samples on the spectrometers.
I have set up the web browser interactive option in ICON-NMR; previously, I only used the ICON web page in view-only mode. Now I use the SSL server option, and require passwords. I found it was straightforward to self sign a certificate to use with the SSL, the only downside is that the end user's browser window will display scary looking security warnings which have to be clicked through one time in order to establish an exception for the spectrometer host. I think this is a good solution for letting people decide for themselves what experiments to add, after they've seen a 1H NMR--without going in the lab.
As far as I know, there isn't an analogous web browser functionality in VnmrJ automation. I am quite interested to see what noMachine does, though I am guessing there would be an obvious problem if multiple people were trying at the same time to move the mouse around and click stuff remotely in VnmrJ. Are noMachine and Team Viewer automatically limited to one external connection at a time? There might be other solutions to this.
The flip side of how that research nonprofit institute operates is that they have qPCR in house and they have every staff member do a nasal swab every MWF morning. They have an answer out by about 1 pm on the sampling days. They have made this sampling part of a clinical research study on rates of community transmission, approved by the IRB of a nearby medical school. (There are also some people in the study who were officially diagnosed with coronavirus and are considered fully recovered, but they still have viral RNA long afterwards in this assay.)
Exactly how much testing we would be able to do at Caltech as part of reopening, and what kind, is still very much up in the air. They'd like to have the clinical rapid assay capacity but are finding it's hard to purchase right now. But unless only a fraction of researchers are allowed to begin work (determined how?), I am very unclear that there could be testing for more than a random fraction of the people entering labs. In terms of contact tracing, what I have heard is that people will be asked to write down everyone they come in contact with each day, no ID card swiping to enter spaces, no Bluetooth and phone apps, etc.
To me, it seems there is an element of magical thinking in expecting those precautions to be sufficient. It's too restrictive to make the term "magical thinking" all or nothing. Better to define a "coefficient of magical thinking" attached to a plan as a dimensionless number between 1 and 0. I'd like to have my lab management plan have the lowest coefficient of magical thinking of any component of the research reboot. I feel pretty good about NMR tubes that have been rinsed with alcohol as the only point of contact between my lab and PI labs.
David VanderVelde
Manager, Liquids NMR Facility, Caltech
davidv_at_caltech.edu
Received on Fri May 08 2020 - 10:22:11 MST