As previously described

As a bench scientist, there is nothing I hate more about designing a protocol than going to the Materials and Methods section of a publication which used that technique and seeing this:

Because, then, having already taken the time to look up the first paper, you now have to look up the second paper in which sometimes–in an effort to make my brain explode or something–the procedure is cross-referenced yet again.   This can only be made more annoying by this fact:

The paper is from my lab.

Yes, folks, I looked in our book of Lab Methods with no success and I looked in a published book of protocols where this particular protocol was written by my advisor and the critical bit of information I needed was missing.  I then had to find a paper in which we used this procedure only to find the above explanation.  Finally, I tracked down the original paper which was fortunately not too difficult since it was from our lab (but I couldn’t find my copy so I had to get it from pubmed).

Needless to say, I was a little frustrated by the whole experience.  Fortunately, I now have the information I needed and I’m going to start the procedure right now.