This question just appeared on the site, and made me realise we don't have a 'troubleshooting' tag. How would people feel if I create one? It would identify questions where the poster has attempted a (reproducible) experiment and it has gone wrong in some way. A few examples of existing questions that could be tagged with it are:
- Picking up Plasmid DNA using Nanodrop, but not using Electrophoresis
- How can I clean phenol extracted RNA?
- How can I get brighter DNA bands?
- How can I fit the A595 of my unknown samples to the data?
- How can I reduce the background gradient in phase contrast microscopy?
- Stable isotope sample preparation: Bone Collagen
- Long term storage of agarose-ethidium bromide gels that have already been cast
- Strange behavior of a DNA gel
- No bands show up in gel electrophoresis, not even marker
- How to protect my mounted insect specimens from ... insects?
- What is possibly wrong in my gel electrophoresis when I didn't see bands of DNA ladder on gel?
- (possibly) Additive genetic variance components from LMER in R
- Interpretation of faint band for Linear Array HPV Genotyping Test
Like species-identification, we could come up with guidance on the minimum amount of information that should be included for this.
Advantages:
- a tag that can be used to quickly filter questions that are likely to be asked by professional biologists, increasing the utility of the SE by this group;
- a fairly objective right-or-wrong answer (first answer that fixes the OP's problem gets accepted).
I'm anticipating (and hoping to counter) arguments for possible overlap with the following tags:
- molecular-biology (and lab-techniques): the new tag would not be specific to a particular area of biology - molecular biology, bioimaging, bioinformatics, ecological statistics, dissection etc would all be on topic.
- methods: the new tag would explicitly deal with questions where the poster has already attempted something and run into problems, not just questions where the poster is asking for suggestions on how to attempt something.
PS - I realise most of my examples are electrophoresis-based; I ran out of inspiration while looking for examples. I will try to remember to diversify the list later.
