1. “Why isn’t my CRISPR working?”
2. “If my needle clogs one…more…time…”
3. “I’m only three trainee lineages away from Brenner.”
4. “I don’t get why this cross isn’t working. Maybe I need to put on some mood music like Barry White.”
5. “I went on a date last night and I told him I spent 3 exciting hours in a dark room with lasers. He asked me if it was a cool rave.”
6. “Ugh, no cookies at seminar? I feel tricked.”
7. “I have a lucky pick. I only bring it out for those really hard crosses. I do a silent prayer to the Genetics Gods right before I pick F2s.”
8. “So I posted on the WormBase forum and I didn’t get roasted…”
9. “I emailed the author asking for help with a protocol in her paper. She replied back and sent me a 20 page Word file. The original method in her paper was only 5 sentences.”
10. “Do you think the worms know they’re in an all-you-can-eat buffet of bacteria?”
11. “I’m so so sad I didn’t get a selfie with Mello.”
12. “Yeah I bought the C. elegans giant microbe. Its name is Unc-ie.”
13. “Is it sad that I look forward to In-N-Out more than socializing at the LA worm meeting?”
14. “Pass the EtOH. No, I meant the gin, not the 70% EtOH.”
15. “I really hope I get to go to Madison this year, pitchers at the Memorial Union are the best.”
16. “Why is it that during poster sessions there’s alcohol but only water during talks?”
17. “I’m sorry, did you just say free beer?”

While slaving away hard at the bench, we have serendipitously discovered a new mutation that has increased repeatability and significance of any assay we have performed. This mutation significantly reduces the level of experimental error so intensely that we can actually report standard deviation instead of standard error of the mean. P-values are minuscule and our graphs have more stars than ever (Figure 1). In addition, putting our strains in this background has allowed us to perform extremely beautiful Western blots, so beautiful that we do not need to use Photoshop to ‘robustify’ our figures (Figure 2).

As typical naming of genes follows the phenotype they induce, we believe we have identified a mutation affecting a new class of genes, hereby called robust, or rbst.  Mutations affecting genes belonging to this class affect experimental performance and data reproducibility.  Tim Schedl has yet to reply to our request to be formally assigned this new class of genes, but we are confident that Jonathan Hodgkin would approve. We have mapped this mutation, win1, to either the left arm of LG III or LG IV. The graduate student currently performing the mapping studies is ironically failing to achieve a robust confirmation.

In conclusion, we report identification of a new allele, rbst-1(win1) III?; IV? which makes all results significantly more robust and will be sure to get your papers accepted without revisions. Stay tuned for more updates on our robust progress. No, we are not sharing our magical strain just yet, but if you would like to form a robust collaboration with us to pursue further robust experiments, please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing your robust ideas. Thanks to Steve Hodgkinson for critical reading and verbal abuse regarding this data. Thanks to BC-V for technical advice and moral support. Thanks to Chib, raela and dunnp for robust shenanigans.