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When asked if there were other problems she encounters in her day-to-day life, she said that it is difficult to keep track of the various permutations of an experimental protocol that exist, and wished for a centralized way of knowing what people have tried in the past and what worked. For instance, she is currently working on a protocol for chromatin fractionation and is trying to gather as much information about it as she can. When we asked if we could see how she went about gathering information about a protocol, she revealed a large stack of papers and spent considerable time navigating it to find her desired paper, which was the experimental protocol published by the Young Lab. She then pulled up another set of papers which had the protocol that she had obtained from talking to the Young Lab directly. The latter protocol had several handwritten annotations and was messy to read, but also contained substantially more detail than the official published protocol. Photographs of the two papers side by side are included below: 
V also mentioned that even within the lab, variations of a protocol (eg: for chromatin immunoprecipitation) exist for different antibodies and conditions, and the only way to gather all the necessary information is to go talking to people which is inefficient. Other members in the lab who were present seconded this opinion. A quick look at the lab notebooks revealed that Biologists would copy protocols into their lab notebook even though they are present on the lab’s online wiki in order to make annotations like the one shown below (“JW” is another member of the lab): 
Furthermore, in optimizing an experimental procedure, biologists also keep track of their previous attempts and their mistakes, so that they know what worked and what did not. Very often biologists will commit an error in a step and will proceed with the protocol anyway, as it is a learning experience in how sensitive individual steps in the protocol are. An example of such an annotation is shown below: 
As the years progress, however, lab notebooks can become bulky, and the task of flipping through them to identify the desired iteration of an experiment can be tedious. Some biologists use electronic lab notebooks, but they are still not optimized for tracking the various iterations of an experiment.
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