How To Create an Integrated Lab?
- 2. Recently I have spent 1 day with an assistant professor, who just started his own lab …
- 3. ... I shadowed him for a day and he showed me how he runs his lab, coordinates team meetings, and tracks progress …
- 4. He is a very organized person and had put in place a very sophisticated system of spreadsheets for everything (from tracking experiments to ordering reagents). However, for this system to work, he had to spend: 4 hours each day!
- 5. At the end of the day, he confessed: "I spend way too much time copy-pasting data in different spreadsheets. If only all this data could work together.".
- 6. ... so here is my advice on How To Create an Integrated Lab:
- 8. As the science output increases due to the progress of technology, you will need fully integrated systems that can automate the data flow. Relying on a number of spreadsheets, notebooks and other systems to track progress and inventory is error-prone and very tedious to maintain.
- 10. In order to achieve interoperability of data, we have to have a "common denominator", a software tool that is the single source of truth. Scientists' work varies heavily between fields, methods, equipment availability, and budget to name just a few. Therefore, every scientist needs a different set of tools to perform their research.
- 11. The only approach that we see viable for the future is to have a "central nervous system", which has an API (application programming interface) and integrates with other, specific tools (from data acquisition to analysis and publishing). Electronic lab notebooks (ELN) seem to be a natural fit for this.
- 13. Many of cloud providers (Google, Dropbox, Microsoft) also offer their tools for data and document editing, so it is essential that they are integrated with an ELN. The output of scientific data is exponentially increasing and digital storage space has become a bottleneck.
- 14. There are already many platforms out there that collect data from different sources and send them to the cloud. It is then relatively easy to pull all this data into an ELN. Being able to pull raw data automatically from scientific instruments not only saves time but also makes everything much more traceable.
- 15. It takes too long before the data becomes the final graph or image. Being able to push raw data directly to analytic tools would also save a lot of time as well as track the analysis automatically. The number of data analysis tools is growing even faster than the number of lab instruments and many scientists use over 50 tools for their work.
- 16. Having inventory associated with experiments you do, can enable the system to make predictions about the amounts required, as well as automate the ordering of reagents once they are below a threshold. One of the most challenging and time-consuming things in a lab: to keep track of inventory. It is usually done through a master Excel file, with lists never completely up to date that may leave you without a reagent mid-experiment.
- 17. This way we can also track which modifications we made to the materials and methods of other researchers and position our research within the realm of broader science. All of the above should be integrated with relevant existing knowledge in the scientific literature. It would enable us to see what inspired us to do an experiment and why we made some assumptions.
- 18. Starting with an ELN and going from paper to digital is a good 1st step. We are nowhere near the complete solution to scientific data interoperability. However, a lot of ELN vendors are coming up with clever integrations, falling into their natural place as the single source of truth.
- 19. „Once you are comfortable with a digital system in your lab, integrations are just one step away."
- 20. With SciNote we have already integrated Gilson IoT platform, Protocols.io and Microsoft online + we have a few of them lined up already. SciNote is open source and free to use, so I recommend you give it a try at: SciNote.net
- 21. Read Full Article Written by: Klemen Zupancic, PhD – CEO Experienced business development professional with a PhD in Biomedicine – Genomics and a demonstrated history of working in the Computer Software industry.