Welcome to the UW Forest Mycobiome Lab! We’re so excited to have you joining us! This document will introduce you to our lab’s goals, core values, safety guidelines, and provide a checklist for getting started. Our lab focuses on fungal ecology and functional consequences of plant associations with fungi in a changing climate. We are committed to fostering a safe, inclusive, and collaborative environment.
Access our lab safety protocols in the Lab-Safety-Docs repository. Review all documents carefully, including general lab guidelines, emergency contacts, and specific protocols for equipment and procedures relevant to your work.
Refer to this matrix to determine which safety trainings you need to complete. This will include:
Chemical safety Biological safety Equipment training Familiarize Yourself with Emergency Procedures Learn the location of safety equipment such as eyewash stations, fire extinguishers, and first aid kits. Review the Emergency_Procedures documents on GitHub.
Title IX Training: https://tixemployee.uw.edu/
Schedule a time to meet with Claire and your lab mentor.
Odegaard Undergraduate Library, ground floor level Open for walk-in service (9:00 am–noon and 1:00 pm–4:00 pm)
For general day-to-day communication in the lab, we rely on Slack. Because we use the free version of Slack, messages are arhived for short periods of time. For items where we need to communciate with someone external to the lab or when we need to archive a communications, email is the preferred.
In addition to our lab Slack channel, we also host a reading group for the broader fungal community. You will also be added to this Slack channel in case you would like to participate in the reading group or keep track of papers that come out that are posted there.
We host two different lab Google calendars: one for general lab happenings and the other for specific lab equipment use.
Our lab has moved to an online lab notebook and protocols system called Benchling. Lab protocols are hosted here and can be added to your personal lab notebooks for use and project-specific modifications.
Our lab ordering and inventorying is done through Quartzy. This is where you can request new items, track what has been previously ordered, or re-order supplies. You will be added to Quartzy using your UW account.
We use GitHub as a repository for general lab information and as a version-control and back up system: https://github.com/UW-ForestMycobiomeLab. This ensures that code is securely stored, version-tracked, and accessible to collaborators, with ongoing maintenance and updates as needed. One of our lab policies to promote accessibility and transparency is to make our code publicly available upon publication; by keeping our code in a central repository, we can easily collaborate and publish our code for other researchers.
We also commit to publishing our data in public repository (except where senstive information, e.g. exact sampling coordinates needs to be withheld). Our lab Zenodo account is linked here: https://zenodo.org/communities/uw-forestmycobiomelab/.