The Remix

The Remix

Labs are reopening after COVID-19 shutdowns, but will the workplace ever look like the “before times” again?

By Dara Chadwick

In March 2020—as COVID-19 infections began to rise in the U.S.—physiology laboratories at academic institutions faced an unprecedented on-campus situation: Classes canceled. Labs shuttered to all but critical personnel. Animal models lost, and research slowing down and, at times, slipping off track completely.

While scientists are no strangers to uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic’s complete disruption of lab life had even the most intrepid researchers asking, “Will things ever get back to normal?” Now, 18 months later and with many staffers and students vaccinated, the answer is … maybe. While labs have reopened and students are returning, “normal” doesn’t necessarily look the same as it once did.

William Jackson, PhD, FAPS, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing and an APS Councilor, says that “normal” at MSU has included an online daily health check-in asking people to attest that they weren’t experiencing COVID-19 symptoms (voluntary attestation of COVID-19 vaccination was added in early June 2021). These daily check-ins, part of the university’s reactivation plan launched in June 2020, stayed in place through June 28, 2021, Jackson says. 

We don’t have the same foot traffic we used to have. But it’s nice to see people in the halls because it was a ghost town for a long time.

William Jackson, PhD, FAPS

As of July 2021, fully vaccinated individuals were no longer required to wear masks or social distance. Students, faculty and personnel are welcome to return to the lab full time, and research can return to business as usual. But has it? 

Not exactly, Jackson says. “The labs are still not as active as they were pre-COVID,” he says. “Our building is now locked 24/7, and you have to have key card access to get in. We don’t have the same foot traffic we used to have. But it’s nice to see people in the halls because it was a ghost town for a long time.”

Jackson says he’s primarily a lab of one, studying cerebral circulation, particularly arterioles in the brain and their involvement in disease states such as hypertension and obesity. The lab’s physical space includes six microdissection stations where researchers remove arterioles from tissue. But Jackson also runs part of the department’s imaging center, and his two lab spaces—at just under 1,000 square feet collectively—are home to a confocal microscope and two photon microscopes. “That’s department equipment that I supervise,” he says, adding that researchers use the equipment all the time. “So even though my lab is small, there’s a lot of activity.”

During initial COVID-19 closures from March through June 2020, the lab was completely closed except for people coming in to maintain animal protocols. “The lab I collaborate with uses a high-fat feeding model of obesity,” Jackson says. “That was the only thing that was really kept going during COVID.”

Jackson says he also faced challenges in maintaining the imaging equipment during closures. “The equipment needs to be maintained at the right temperature,” he explains. “They have chillers associated with them, and they run out of cooling solution, not frequently, but not in a predictable fashion because it depends on use and room temperature. There were a few people coming in to use the microscopes to do experiments with animals that were already in process and needed to be studied at a particular time.”

While some work continued this past year, other experiments were lost, Jackson says. “We had a small colony of mice that expressed a calcium indicator in their endothelial cells so we could study calcium regulation,” he says. “We lost those during the shutdown. People couldn’t get in to take care of them, and we were under a no-breeding mandate. No new animals were coming in, and for the experiments we were doing, we needed them at certain ages. We lost the whole colony, and we’ve had to completely change how we’re going to do this project we’re working on. It’s basically knocked us back about two years.”

Adapting for Safety

As MSU implemented its reactivation plan throughout the summer and fall of 2020, two people were allowed to be in the lab at the same time, Jackson says. That allowed research to continue, but at a much slower pace. “Now, we’re back up to five days a week,” he says. “We’ve adapted, and we’re just working on different aspects of the same project, trying to get the other stuff going as we can.”

Initially, MSU mandated that any work that could be done at home should be, Jackson says. Now, the option to work remotely remains in place for those who aren’t comfortable returning to work in person. Some class sizes may be adjusted, he adds, noting that “enormous lectures” may be reduced, and some hybrid class models may be used.

MSU has also implemented “Spartan Spit,” a weekly mandatory saliva-based assay to screen all students for COVID-19. Faculty and staff can choose to be screened too. “A lot of people in our department have elected to do it, including myself,” he says.

One thing that doesn’t seem to be changing at many institutions is the physical layout of laboratory space. While physical distancing has been shown to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 among unvaccinated people, most managers say they have relied on policies such as staggered schedules and remote work to help researchers keep their distance from each other. 

“We haven’t made any changes in the physical layout of the laboratory, but I’m still encouraging people who are writing to do that at home,” says Bonnie Blazer-Yost, PhD, professor of biology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. “All the graduate students have really stepped up and are quite busy. I trust them to just go home and do the work they need to do if they can do that.”

Blazer-Yost’s lab includes three graduate students and one undergraduate who are using animal models of hydrocephalus to study cerebrospinal fluid production via electrolyte transporters found in tissue called the choroid plexus. “What we’re trying to do is make progress toward finding a drug treatment for hydrocephalus,” she says.

The work includes a lot of data analysis and writing that can be done remotely. But keeping the breeding colony going and genotyping the litters when they’re born is critical to the lab’s model of pediatric hydrocephalus. “The animals don’t live past day 20, so they have to be genotyped shortly after they’re born so we know who’s affected and who’s not,” Blazer-Yost says. “All of the people in my lab are fully vaccinated so we’ve felt a bit more comfortable with having everybody come back to work.”

While a fully vaccinated lab team brings some measure of comfort, it’s important to consider options for when that might not be the case. Marilee Lloyd, AIA, an architect and senior laboratory planner with the national architecture and engineering firm HED in Southfield, Michigan, says that while safety has always been paramount in designing research laboratories, COVID-19 has added more dimensions to consider.

All the graduate students have really stepped up and are quite busy. I trust them to just go home and do the work they need to do if they can do that.

Bonnie Blazer-Yost, PhD

One consideration typically reviewed but that has taken on added importance is making sure there are enough air changes in the lab so that any particulates properly leave the space, she says. “We typically spend a little time visioning a space with our clients to understand what their strategic goals are so we know how flexible an environment to target. We consider what type of science is being done and apply the most appropriate module, which is a way of making the space more amenable to change, flexibility and adaptability.”

Those conversations with clients help Lloyd make decisions about equipment such as HVAC systems and the need for overall flexibility in the environment. For example, a modular approach can give laboratories the ability to move some benching to create space or to move in a larger piece of equipment. 

Another consideration for lab design in a post-COVID–19 world is the density of the laboratory, Lloyd says. “How many research staff are working there?” she says. “Is the work more analytical, with more instruments and fewer people working? Will staff set up an experiment and monitor it from elsewhere?”

If changing a lab’s layout isn’t practical, institutions can make process changes to help protect workers from spreading infection. For example, Lloyd says, as a response to COVID-19 she’s seeing labs encourage workers to take fresh eye protection when entering the lab instead of reusing safety glasses. There’s also more focus on a daily wipe-down of laboratory equipment and one-way travel, she says, adding that she’s also been approached about putting up plexiglass between lines of benching to create barriers. Her firm is also seeing a greater interest in touchless fittings in laboratories, such as foot pedals and electronic sensors.

Lloyd says conversations with clients designing new laboratory spaces often include a discussion of COVID-19 nowadays. “Both from the institutional perspective and our own as designers, we’re all still understanding where we’re going to be in a year or five years,” she says. “Early on, we didn’t know the efficacy of these vaccines, so we didn’t know how that was going to impact us—or not—in the long term.”

Flexibility Required

Creating flexibility in physical space is one component of physiology lab work post-COVID–19. But flexibility in research—and in thinking—has proved just as valuable. Bina Joe, PhD, distinguished university professor and chair of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences in Ohio, pivoted quickly to help her team stay productive during pandemic closures.

“I thought, ‘how can we engage trainees with their brilliant minds to get publications?’” Joe says, adding that the bioinformatics team in her lab was working on machine learning for cardiovascular diseases. “We switched and asked if machine learning could be used to predict COVID-19.”

The work was published in April 2020 in the APS journal Physiolgical Genomics and was cited more than 150 times and downloaded more than 32,000 times. “So, I charged all the trainees to think of what else they could publish with the data they had,” she says. “All of a sudden, people were thinking, ‘what is this new disease and what do we have from the lab that we can contribute to the literature?’ One of the postdocs came up with the idea that we have data from germ-free rats compared to germ-full rats and that microbiota may be contributing to the severity of COVID or susceptibility of COVID.”

The postdoc published a rapid report in the journal Hypertension in May 2020—an opportunity that grew specifically from the lockdown, Joe says. “If we hadn’t had as severe a lockdown, people would have continued their ongoing projects and never thought of writing such pieces,” she says. “The productivity in our department went up really fast. We had the highest number of publications this year.”

With vaccines encouraged, Joe’s department was back to full in-person capacity as of July. Masking and physical distancing mandates had been lifted. In fact, the only lingering issue Joe sees is a potential dip in international student enrollment. “Although travel is permitted, students are facing hardships obtaining their visas,” she says.

Another issue lab leaders are watching closely is COVID-19 variants, such as the Delta variant. “Like most scientists, I’m watching it very carefully,” Blazer-Yost says. “I’m sure the university is as well. As scientists, we can all assess the guidelines. It’s amazing how the scientific community has come together and developed the vaccines. It makes one proud to be a scientist.” 

This article was originally published in the September 2021 issue of The Physiologist Magazine.