Erika Alden DeBenedictis on Erika’s Newsletter

Maybe other folks at Pioneer would want to chime in here, but here's my take on these questions 1. When you make a new experiment, we have it auto-populate with a few default headings in the unstructured part (Purpose, Background, Experiment Design, Lab Notebook, Conclusions and Next steps). In terms of expectations for what to write down, that sort of evolves organically. Other people at Pioneer are good about taking notes, so that alone creates a social expectation to do similarly. Some people write really fantastic notes, and once you've seen someone else do it well you start getting the picture. Once we've done a protocol a few times it becomes more clear what's worth writing down. For new protocols, the steps get written directly in the daily notes. We also have a protocols database once we have something that gets reused, and in that case it just gets linked. 2. Yeah this is hard! For sure, lots of times you do an experiment and the conclusion is to re-do it/try again :P Sometimes folks just include the next round in the same experiment page, and this makes the most sense if you just had a total technical failure and just need to try it again. If it's getting long, or if the first experiment taught us something even if we want to re-do, they'll close the experiment out and start fresh. Agreed that projects help keep track of side quests. IMO needing to fill out an experiment page for side quests and tag a project is easy, but also enough of a reality check to encourage folks not to go off on crazy side quests that aren't worth it. 3. We have a laptop in lab that has the LIMS open in one tab and the label printer in the other. Once you're accustomed to doing it, printing labels is easy enough that it's arguably easier than writing on a tube... at least for any tube you want to keep around for any length of time. Separately, once folks are back at their desk they can write any notes about the LIMS objects they've made, copy paste the numbers into their experiment page, etc. Agreed that not all samples are worthy of being preserved forever, and indeed not all tubes in lab are assigned LIMS objects. So if you've made a overnight culture and are going to miniprep it, the *only* tube that gets a LIMS ID is the final prep.