Let me tell you all a story about the importance of negative controls. This is a reminder that we all screw up. About a week ago I posted a photo of what appeared to be a dominant fungal morphotype growing from plated macerates of serial diluted #Massospora plugs!https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten" aria-label="Emoji: Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten">

Our plan was to see what fungi took up residence in Massospora plugs either as a result of already being inside the cicada or that colonized the plugs from the outside. At first I did not have negative controls because i thought the sterile water on the bench was STERILE.

But thinking back to my first attempt last year, I couldn& #39;t recall this culturable fungus. As a reminder Massospora does not grow on agar. So we collected an additional six Massospora-infected cicadas and this time I prepared new sterile water. The white fungus was missing!

As a check, I also plated some of the old water and new water to see if any fungi were kicking around. The results confirmed what i had already suspected: the water was harboring a white fungus. The source was the water not the cicada!!!

Moral of the story: we all screw up, especially PIs with little time to set up their own side projects. But we need to normalize failure because that& #39;s how science works. We learn and move on to the next experiment.