laboratory informatics
Discovering the tools that aid innovation
The shift towards collaboration and ‘externalisation’ is placing increased importance
on managing and sharing data
Work in the R&D laboratory starts with an idea and an
experiment, not a sample. Sophia Ktori investigates how informatics packages are tailored to make life easier for scientists in the discovery laboratory
P
rising paper notebooks out of some researchers’ hands and replacing them with a laptop or terminal can be a traumatic exercise, and nowhere is this
more true than in the drug discovery laboratory. Reasons for not embracing the soſtware tools that have been developed specifically to make scientists lives easier and maximise value from data are predictable, suggests Graham Langrish, sales manager at LabWare. ‘We hear things like, “Our work isn’t regulated, so we don’t need a laboratory system or an audit trail for every experiment”, or “Te soſtware isn’t
4 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
flexible enough to capture and manage the huge breadth of both unstructured and structured data that we generate”.’
Inefficient and inconsistent Yet we all know that writing on paper is a highly inefficient way of recording and storing data, Langrish points out. Pen and paper generate effectively dead data that can’t be queried or searched, ‘Everyone has their own way of jotting things down, and there is no consistency. Handwritten notes are also subject to misinterpretation, and scientists who leave
the company will effectively take a huge amount of their accumulated knowledge with them. Consider two laboratories that are working on different aspects of the same project research at geographically distinct sites. Expecting them to pass around scanned pages from a paper notebook or emailing Microsoſt Office files or Excel spreadsheets between sites, is totally impractical.’
Share and share alike It is also false economy not to invest in an informatics infrastructure, Langrish maintains. ‘At the very least, scientists need an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) so that all their experiments and processes are logged systematically and are searchable. Results can be shared, and data mined and revisited to avoid repetition. A laboratory information management system (LIMS) adds more value by providing an overall management framework
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