It opens up collaborations with other colleagues who are more basic researchers, it also allowed my to open up my lab to other members of my department who don’t have the equipment to share the resources with them. I also now rely less on taxonomic experts to identify insects, since using sequencing, I can usually find out the species. I also found that using molecular methods speeds up methods often, for example when thinking about gut content analysis, it would take orders of magnitude more time to dissect each insects’ gut and try to determine from the fragments what it ate. One of the most gratifying things having this skills set in my lab is to see students learn it and be able to land jobs where this is a priority. On the other side, one of the cons is that the equipment for setting up a molecular lab can be expensive. I used my start up funds to by the key pieces, and I wasn’t hesitant to save money by purchasing used items like water baths and vortexers. Another challenge can be maintaining sufficient precision and cleanliness especially for super sensitive methods such as the real time PCR. It can sometimes take some convincing to have people embrace the level of cleanliness needed. The other challenge related to this is the space where these cleaner methods can be carried out. I was lucky to have a separate room for molecular lab away from the dirty, field sample sorting lab.
