Automation of Laboratory Activities Through Integration of an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) with a Scientific Data Management System (SDMS)

Abstract

Industry and academic laboratories have long resisted conversion to electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) while at the same time integrating many other kinds of information systems, most notably laboratory information management systems (LIMS), chromatography data systems (CDS), and scientific data management systems (SDMS), within laboratory operations. Scientists in both academia and industry stand to gain important functionality unavailable with paper notebooks with the adoption of ELNs such as comprehensive searching of notebooks (keyword, result, and molecular structure/substructure searching, for example); distributed availability; and long term access to data. Currently, most laboratory information systems operate independently, requiring manual data entry by users into each individual system. This process creates data and information disparities as well as creating poor referential integrity within experimental metadata. Electronic laboratory notebooks would provide a logical point around which experiment details and observations could be centered electronically. Through an ELN, experimental documentation or metadata could be communicated automatically with a LIMS, SDMS, or CDS without analyst involvement. This “electronically connected” system would allow analysts to perform their responsibilities without the interruption of independent information systems thus increasing analyst productivity and reducing user entry errors into data management systems. The thesis project consisted of two phases: the first phase was the implementation of an ELN and the second phase was the development of a software developer kit (SDK) for LABTrack based on Web Services. In the first phase of the project the adoption of an ELN, was studied within a classroom laboratory (G823 Introduction to Cell Biology) over the course of one academic semester. In the second phase of the project an SDK for LABTrack was developed to allow the importation of information from custom developed applications into LABTrack. Finally, a web portal integrating LABTrack and NuGenesis was developed to demonstrate the capabilities of the LABTrack SDK and existing capabilities of the NuGenesis SDK.