An agar horror story and identifying a reddish liquid

There’s something in the agar Many of us have heard horror stories involving ghosts, monsters, or pulling an all-nighter before your thesis defense. But picture this: you’re running a simple yeast-plating experiment in your lab, and when you return to check in on your cells, nothing’s there. That’s what happened to yeast geneticist Reine Protacio in the summer of 2023. Protacio studies meiosis in the fission yeast species Schizosaccharomyces pombe at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. When students started struggling to plate the yeasts, and when even the control plates were turning up empty, she knew something was wrong. Systematically switching out components of the culture media revealed that water, ammonium sulfate, glucose, and supplements weren’t responsible for the problem. But when Protacio and her team tested different lots of agar, they noticed that cells grew as expected on some lots but didn’t grow effectively on others. The