Water, you say?

I hurried to the train station on a bleak winter morning. As I navigated patches of ice on the cobble-stone walkways, my breath blooming like frosty little clouds in front of my face, I remember thinking, “Why would anyone from a tropical island decide to take on a workshop in England in the dead of winter?” Biochemists like a challenge, I suppose?

I was visiting Oxford University for the first time and was excited to participate in a discussion on quality assurance in the laboratory. Our lead facilitator was Sandy Primrose who has authored more than a dozen textbooks on gene manipulation. Among us older-generation biochemists, he was the greatest of all time — an honest-to-goodness GOAT.

Sephra Rampersad

Sephra Rampersad waits at a train station during her visit to the UK.

I had a two-hour commute to the university from where I was staying near Camden. The workshop started just as I entered the lecture room in Ewert House. I was set.

At one point, Primrose asked the group to identify the one critical component that could make or break your experiment in any lab. Our answers varied as we considered every possible villainous character in the lab — from people to reagents to equipment to money. All were reasonable responses, but none of those were the answer our facilitator was looking for.

His gave us a hint: It’s in every single reaction we would ever prepare in the lab.

Water is the key to success.

Water, you say? The chemically inert solvent containing one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms with a neutral charge is a biochemist’s nightmare?

Exactly. Let me explain why.

Water quality and the methods used to purify it are important to a successful reaction, more so the ones in molecular biology that are driven by enzymes that utilize divalent cations as cofactors. And sometimes, water contains cations that an enzyme should do without.

We must rinse glassware in pure or ultra-pure water to remove traces of detergents that can interfere with serological reactions. Water used in the lab must be free of particulate, ionic, organic and microbial contaminants.

High-quality water ensures minimal carry-over and residue contamination during cuvette and probe washing, increases reagent stability, improves accuracy and precision in pipetting, and results in greater accuracy in spectrophotometric readings.

Among the gold standards of testing is reproducibility and high water quality plays an integral role in achieving reproducible results. The most basic necessity for life is also the basic necessity for my life as a researcher.

As the day ended, I made my way over the bridge to the train station once more; only this time, snow flurries kept me company during my walk, so fragile they melted as soon as they touched the warmer ground. Street lamps illuminated my route and turned the melting snow and ice into shimmering pools. Water, in all its forms, was all around me, and now I was paying attention.