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Hi all,

I am starting a thread for sharing cool ideas/hacks people have come across to make life easier in their labs. These can be organisational or cool chemistry tricks. For example...

In my lab group, we are currently doing a lot of boron chemistry and last year came along a recipe for curcumin stain for boronic acids and esters (originally found on another discussion forum). Instead of buying the stain, you can easily make some using turmeric powder from the grocery store. I usually stir to dissolve the turmeric powder in ethanol (1g/50 mL) and then filter it into a glass bottle before acidifying it with 1 mL or so of 2N HCl. We love it and use it all the time!

What other cool lab hacks or organisational ideas have you guys come across so far?

I've always wanted to try this because my work revolves around boronic acids but we didn't want to buy curcumin just for this. That you can use tumeric from the grocery store makes me much more likely to try this, thanks for that! (Original paper for this stain)

Contintuing the TLC hacks, sometimes to get the eluent to go up the plate uniformly and not up one edge faster, it is handy to cut the corners of the TLC plate as shown below