If you've ever followed a written protocol step by step and still ended up with a gel that looks like modern art, you're not alone.
I've spent ten years in the scientific video field, talking with PIs, postdocs, grad students, and lab managers day in and day out. The same problem kept surfacing: people need video protocols, but the good ones sit behind paywalls that many labs simply can't afford. The free ones are scattered across YouTube, university sites, and personal blogs, and finding a reliable one can eat up an afternoon.
The most valuable material of all is the hardest to find: failure cases. Why your bands came out wavy, why your cells turned into a disaster movie, why your PCR gave you nothing but primer dimers, none of this makes it into the papers. You have to fail first, then work it out yourself, usually alone.
So I decided to do something about it.
Labtorial is a free site I spent more than a year building. It pulls together high-quality, openly accessible lab videos from across the web, currently 1676 videos across 13 disciplines from 54 sources, plus 585 real-world failure cases, because learning from someone else's misery is far more efficient than manufacturing your own.
The site is free now, and it will stay free. It runs as a non-profit labour of love, aggregating only open-access content through legitimate means, with sources credited and copyright respected. No piracy, no shady business.
Is it perfect? Not yet, and neither is my Western blot technique. But I keep improving it. If you give it a try and tell me what's clunky or missing, every piece of feedback goes straight onto my to-do list.
After ten years in this field, this is my way of saying thanks to the research community, one video and one failure case at a time.
— Founder, Labtorial
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