Jonas Kubilius on Erika’s Newsletter

Thanks for a detailed and inspiring write-up. I'm constantly trying to improve the organization of my lab notes and your approach brings a refreshing perspective. I've got a few practical questions: 1. Do you have certain structure/guidelines to the free-form part of the Experiment page where people keep their daily notes? I find that enforcing a certain structure helps with readability and lowers chances of errors but is quite time consuming to do, especially when developing new assays. I find that people in many cases end up leaving out a lot of information (e.g., final concentrations because it takes time to compute them) or perform smaller scale experiments even though they could run many more conditions in parallel if they just planned better. I've experimented with ChatGPT o3-generated protocols based on the input materials and goals of an experiment, and that works ok but still needs a few iterations and manual fixes to work properly. 2. How do you decide that a new Experiment page needs to be started? Personally, I find that I often need to optimize my assay quite a bit before it works well, and more often than not it involves testing/optimizing smaller bits of the originally planned experiment. I end up starting a new page for these side quests, but then it becomes disorganized quickly. Perhaps a Project page is a sufficient solution. Or just accepting that experiments branch out organically and there should be no expectation of a perfect order. 3. How do you keep your output materials organized in a box? I understand that each one gets a label, but the label is not self-explanatory. Does that mean people in the lab must constantly loop up materials in the database? Do you have laptops just sitting in the lab for that purpose? We use tablets in our lab but I find them only good for viewing, not adding new entries, and people don't want to bring their laptops to a wet lab due to a possible contamination. Also, entering every single tube with the outputs of an experiment into a database and printing labels seems somewhat tedious (in spite of how useful it is!) – I wonder how easy it was for your researchers to adopt to this new habit.