Over the summer, Stephan continued a project that Navi had started in the lab systematically testing different growth media to see whether or not simply increasing the buffering capacity of the media could result in better protein yields. This idea came about rather serendipitously, as you might imagine! Together they published their findings in the Journal of Biomolecular NMR and the article is online today: "Increasing the buffering capacity of minimal media leads to higher protein yield." They tested three different proteins and generally found that the more buffer salts added the better the protein yields. For isotopically-labeled NMR proteins, this could result in real cost savings as you could grow smaller cultures (and therefore use less of the expensive minimal media components such as 13C-labeled glucose and D2O) by adding only pennies more worth of buffer salts. We are really interested in getting feedback from other labs that try increasing the buffering capacity of their media----so please report back to us if you add this to your protein yield optimization checklist! doi: 10.1007/s10858-018-00222-4