Data management in the lab is a huge potential source of frustration.
Searching for lost chemicals, collating data for manuscripts, producing a single collection of up-to-date SOPs, and losing experimental protocols when experienced personnel leave, are pain points every lab must navigate.
However, the latest lab informatics tools, such as registration systems and electronic lab notebooks, significantly mitigate these issues.
They ensure accurate tracking, organization, and easy retrieval of all your samples and data, minimizing the risk of costly mistakes and wasted time.
This article highlights the benefits of lab management software and demonstrates the huge number of advantages it brings to your research efficiency and data integrity.
Informatics and Lab Management Software. What You Need to Know
Lab informatics and lab management software encompasses a range of digital tools designed to manage, organize, and analyze scientific data to enhance collaboration and improve overall research efficiency in modern labs.
Common software types include:
- Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs)
- Chemical and biological registration systems
- Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS)
- Scientific Data Management Systems (SDMS)
Each of them aims to improve on the pen-and-paper approach to documenting lab work and bypass the reliance on software being used for tasks it wasn’t designed for (like using Excel spreadsheets to index chemicals).
While each type of software is designed with a different goal in mind, the boundaries between them aren’t always clear-cut. This article will primarily focus on registration systems and ELNs.
What Is a Registration System?
A registration system is a specialized software platform used for cataloging chemical and biological entities such as molecules, nucleic acids, peptides, and other compounds.
Unlike inventory management systems, which focus on tracking physical stock and location, registration systems are designed for organizing and managing the structured data associated with these entities, including their experimental results, properties, and relationships.
Key features of a registration system include:
- Unique compound or entity identification
- Association of experimental data with specific entities
- Batch-level registration for differentiating between variations of the same entity
- Search capabilities based on molecular structure or biological sequence
- Tracking of relationships and similarities between entities
Registration systems provide a comprehensive framework for capturing and analyzing detailed experimental data, enabling researchers to make data-driven decisions.
They play a critical role in contexts like drug discovery, where tracking the properties and efficacy of thousands of candidates is essential.
Why Having a Registration System Is a Good Idea
Organizing and managing experimental data is vital for efficient research and development.
A robust registration system lets you easily capture, organize, and analyze complex data associated with chemical and biological entities, helping you streamline your work and make informed decisions.
The main benefits of a registration system include:
- Organizing large-scale experimental data for better analysis and decision-making
- Efficiently managing the structured data needed for evaluating thousands of drug candidates or similar entities
- Avoiding the limitations and inefficiencies of using spreadsheets like Excel for data organization
- Ensuring unambiguous tracking and management of chemical entities based on structure, properties, and experimental results
Additionally, when dealing with large datasets and multiple variants of similar entities, a registration system provides the tools needed to maintain data integrity and consistency, which are critical for compliance, reproducibility, and overall research success.
What Is an Electronic Lab Notebook?
Instead of taking notes on paper, electronic lab notebooks capture notes using a centralized piece of software that’s available on any internet-connected device in your lab, such as a PC, tablet, or smartphone. The ELN is a great complementary tool to Registration Systems because it excels at documenting unstructured data generated in an experiment.
At the most basic level, an electronic lab notebook is a text editor like Microsoft Word.
But their power extends far beyond digital note-taking.
They offer features that a paper lab notebook cannot (Figures 1 and 2), such as:
- Importing and exporting data such as spreadsheets
- SOP and template experimental protocol generation
- Creating common graphs such as dose-response curves
- Analysis of chemical structures
- Sequence analysis of biomolecules
- Importing of 3rd party figures and graphs
- Document and figure annotation
- Standardized vocabulary
- Consistent experimental write-up formats
- Individual- and group-level privacy controls and customizable user privileges
Figure 1. (Image Credit: Collaborative Drug Discovery.)
Figure 2. (Image Credit: Collaborative Drug Discovery.)
Advantages of Electronic Lab Notebooks
They Save You Time Almost Everywhere
From meetings and emails to manuscript writing and grant submissions, electronic lab notebooks save you time almost everywhere.
If you’re writing a manuscript and need to cite what instrument you used for an experiment two years ago, all that information is stored and quick to find.
All your data is immediately available for presentation at any meeting.
Your Data is Consolidated and Searchable
All your experimental data is stored in one place, making it easily searchable and accessible so you can quickly find and use the information you need.
You can search your data in ways that would be impossible with a paper notebook. For example, user, date, and experiment type (Figure 3).
Figure 3. A multitude of assay data sorted and displayed in a two-axis format in an ELN, with the “assay description” on the y-axis and the “assay type” on the x-axis. (Image Credit: Collaborative Drug Discovery.)
You can also build advanced queries to drill down into the nuances of your data.
Collaboration Is Easier
Sharing data between internal and external colleagues is seamless. With the requisite permissions, any collaborator will have real-time access to the latest data and information.
This saves time and eliminates long email threads in which crucial information is easily lost.
Data Access is Streamlined and Uninterrupted
When someone leaves the lab, all their data and expertly refined experimental protocols don’t leave with them.
When new personnel start, they all have access to the same protocols and data.
Having a centralized repository for data that are collected and reported in a standardized way also vastly improves research reproducibility.
They Assure Regulatory Compliance
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has requirements for data security, storage, and management for procedures to qualify for GLP.
Electronic lab notebooks comply with this guidance, meaning you can be confident in the integrity and compliance of your lab procedures.
In addition to the above, there are also many ‘soft’ benefits to electronic lab notebooks, such as:
- Everything’s legible
- Everything’s automatically archived
- They don’t fall apart or get lost
- They don’t take up shelf space
- You save printer ink and paper
Factors to Consider When Choosing an ELN System
When selecting an ELN system, it’s important to assess key factors that align with your lab’s needs and goals.
While technical considerations like installation are important, there are several other critical aspects to evaluate.
Where Will the Software Be Installed?
Depending on your organization’s resources and IT infrastructure, you can choose to install your ELN on:
- A local server
- Your institution’s existing server
- A third-party cloud server
Each option has its own security, accessibility, and IT support pros and cons.
For example, cloud-based systems offer scalability and easy collaboration but come with subscription costs and reliance on external service providers.
Does the ELN Support Biology, Chemistry, or Both?
Ensure that the ELN software you choose is designed to handle the specific type of research your lab conducts.
Some ELNs are tailored more toward biological research, while others are better suited for research more focused on chemistry.
If your lab handles both, consider a platform that seamlessly integrates features for both disciplines. This will enable streamlined data capture, analysis, and collaboration across different research domains.
How Many Users Will You Have?
The scalability of your ELN is another vital consideration, especially if you anticipate that your lab will expand or if you collaborate frequently with external researchers.
Some systems make it more difficult to add users, while others, like CDD Vault, offer flexible pricing models that can accommodate labs of any size and let you provide easy access for external collaborators to enhance the efficiency of multi-institutional projects.
Get the Best of Both Worlds with CDD Vault Data Management Software
Lab management software is designed to make your life easier, not harder.
Multiple pieces of software that deal with faucets of the same umbrella topic like lab organization is a clunky, cumbersome solution.
You’ll have to learn different interfaces and manage multiple sets of logins and user privileges. Plus, there will probably be some overlap in their functionality, and you might want the software to ‘talk’ to each other and be cross-compatible in ways they just aren’t.
CDD Vault is a fully integrated lab organization tool that takes complete care of chemical and biological registration while offering the functionality of electronic lab notebooks in a single software package.
In addition to all of the benefits listed already, CCD Vault lets you:
- Cross-reference items in your chemical register with experiments in your electronic lab notebook
- Annotate items in your chemical register with your experimental data
- Organize and interrogate your data by the chemical batch used
- Manage a single software subscription, a single set of user logins, and customizable user privileges for your entire lab
The inbuilt electronic lab notebook allows you to store and search unstructured experimental data using an advanced query builder.
Additional powerful functionalities such as data visualization, inventory management, AI-enabled chemistry tools, and lab automation are also available within CDD Vault.
Plus, the feel and layout of your lab notebook are completely customizable thanks to sets of configurable user-defined fields compatible with file attachments and outbound links and an intuitive user interface.
The registration system is fully compatible with small molecule and biological entities and calculates key properties based on structural and sequence data.
Click here to request a no-obligation free trial.
