news and products
LABORATORY INFORMATICS
22 August StarDrop User Group Meeting and Workshop
Philadelphia, US 25-27 September
11th Annual ELNs and Advanced Laboratory Solutions Milan, Italy
1-3 October
Global Biobanking 2012 London, UK
T NEWS IN BRIEF
The Starlims web-based LIMS software gains ground in the forensics market
The University of Cape Town (UCT) Drug Discovery and Development Centre, H3-D, deploys the BioBook ELN Charles River Laboratories upgrades to Debra 5.7.10
here have been a number of articles written about data format and interchange standards in laboratory work,
most stressing the ability to export instrument data and providing a basis for the integration of lab systems. The bottom line is simple: standards that lead to integration and data exchange benefit all aspects of the lab automation community. One option is to describe a new method by choosing processing routines, including specialised peak-processing algorithms and baseline correction from a menu and applying it to the data set. The analyst may, for example, want to compare the standard peak processing system with a newly-developed approach selected from a library of routines available from instrument vendors, commercial software developers and researchers. If the new software looks promising, it can be
New products OneLab
OneLab is a highly-configurable platform that unites most of a lab’s information and decision tools into one system, for the management of data with a single user interface. The solution is comprised of three applications: Smart Center, Inventory Manager and Decision Center. Smart Center is a web-based laboratory process management and control application that provides robust connectivity to
instruments as well as a single point for consolidated information. Inventory Manager is an inventory tracking and order management system that utilises Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and, finally, Decision Center uses advanced database technology to integrate data from multiple sources and quickly structures it into visually accessible formats.
www.abbott.com
4 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
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Diary Dates Seeking standards
Joe Liscouski, executive director of the Institute for Laboratory Automation, discusses how informatics standards can lead to the transformation of laboratory work
applied to older data sets to see how it affected those results. Any of the data – current or historical – can be examined interactively using a graphical interface. This same process could be used with almost any instrument.
Although the flow may seem familiar, the details are quite different from today’s lab work due to the availability of one element: standardised formats that describe not only the data for each sample processed, but the organisation of samples in a set. These are standards, their values and sample positions that could be confirmed with barcode scans – similar to that proposed by the ANiML working group. This single fundamental element – well-designed data standards that incorporate both data and a complete description of a test or experiment run – provides a basis for the complete redesign of lab systems and workflows. Both components of the standard are
critical; the data from a single sample in a standardised format is of little value. Most instrumental techniques require access to reference standards. A small development can make a significant change in lab automation and provide the architectural basis for designing lab systems. Making this happen is dependent on the lab automation user community, not the vendors. As we’ve seen in other fields, vendor-driven implementations lead to multiple standards, none of which meet the need. In computer graphics, vendor-driven efforts led to EGA, CGA, VGA, and Hercules ‘standards’ on the hardware side and others in software. In this case, and in others, it was user-driven efforts that drove the development of a standard that provided the basis for today’s successful systems. l To read the full article, please visit
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Qlucore Omics Explorer 2.3
In addition to providing instant and simultaneous access to a larger set of multiple plots, Qlucore Omics Explorer 2.3 features enhanced and faster integration when sharing large sets of data, as well as more flexible options for ordering and visualising larger heatmaps using less memory. New box plots, line plots and histogram plots have been developed
to help researchers visualise, explore and analyse a wider range of integrated high-dimensional data sets interactively and in real-time. Enhancements have also been made to the data import functionality: a flexible data import wizard enables a range of data to be imported from a variety of devices and platforms.
www.qlucore.com
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