LABORATORY INFORMATICS


is not just a problem of sharing data across industry, even within a single organisation it can be difficult. ‘They started a very simple excel


spreadsheet collecting this information and hooked it up to their ELN system, so if someone was going to run an experiment that was using this specific reaction in their database, a pop-up box would appear and warn them,’ said Whittick.


Future plans The team from the University of Southampton are already looking into the next steps of the project, which will focus on recording information in addition to retrieval. ‘This could be used in experimental planning. You would hope that a researcher would look this up before you conduct the experiment,’ said Knight. She noted that integrating this


technology with ELN or LIMS systems would allow users to check for certain hazards or receive prompts about potentially dangerous situations in a particular protocol. ‘The other thing we looked at was the


recording of that data, so you could log incidents and trigger the population of a form at a later date. Getting information from the reaction library is good but you also need to be able to add information about a reaction that you discover,’ added Knight.


As with any database the CSL is only as good as the data that is put into the


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system. One area that the Pistoia Alliance has struggled with so far, is getting companies to collaborate to add their own reactions to the CSL. ‘It is very difficult to get people to


share them. We have been going at this for over a year with the tool that we have built and collected around 130 hazardous reactions,’ said Whittick. ‘The two big questions that the CSL


prototype was trying to answer was “is this information useful?” and we have answered that. More than a thousand people have registered to use the tool. The second part of the experiment was “are people ready to share the information about things that have gone wrong in their labs?” The answer to that is it’s really hard to do so and it is a slow process,’ said Whittick.


Knight noted that this may be part of a wider culture in scientific research where much of the work is not digitised. Scientists are more likely to report the major findings in a published journal, but much of the other data is lost or not accessible in a meaningful way. ‘What I found when looking at what did and didn’t get digitised in our labs was that people would often not digitise something that didn’t work,’ said Knight. ‘People tend to only bother recording the end result. The steps in the middle, whether something has gone wrong safety-wise or whether something has gone wrong in the protocol, people often lose those


”We thought it would be good to combine the challenges to integrate the CSL data with Alexa and IoT devices. The other thing we looked at was the recording of that data, so that you could log incidents and trigger the population of a form at a later date”


attempts and the only things that get written up properly are the things that work in the end.’ Whittick notes that while it has been a


slow process, there is still a lot of potential for the CSL and the accompanying technologies to be integrated in the lab. However, this needs to be accelerated through the collaboration of organisations with reaction data. ‘In trying to encourage the community


to share their incidents – and they all have them because unfortunately, things do go wrong – one of the big stumbling blocks is not wanting to share the experiment in the lab. Well if it’s non-competitive information, there is no danger. It is sometimes a block and it really shouldn’t be,’ concluded Whittick.


August/September 2018 Scientific Computing World 17


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