Tag: Biologics LIMS

Over the past few months, the LabKey team has made several key enhancements to the LabKey Biologics application to help teams organize and visualize data relationships. Take a look at some of these recent enhancement below.

Group Sample and Assay Data Using the Biologics Experiment Framework

An experiment framework has been added to LabKey Biologics that allows users to group all the data relevant to a single experiment. Teams can define a name and description for each experiment, add samples, and upload analytical results.

Navigate Between Generations of Samples with the New Lineage Grid View

In addition to the existing lineage visualizations, LabKey Biologics users can now view all of the ancestors and descendants of a particular sample in an easy to navigate lineage grid. This grid view is particularly helpful when viewing lineage data for samples with large quantities of related samples or lengthy derivation history.

Auto-Register Sequences During GenBank File Import

Improvements to LabKey Biologics import process enable to the auto-registration of multiple sequences when a GenBank file is uploaded. With these changes the full sequence of the plasmid, the coding sequences, and the resultant protein sequences are now auto-registered.

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Cell culture is a central component of protein development and the media used during this process can have a significant impact on its performance. In the R&D environment, media technicians are responsible for both the precise production of cell culture media and the optimization of media recipes to maximize qualities such as growth and stability.

Capturing the detailed information about recipes, ingredients, and batches needed to optimize media production is one of the key challenges faced within protein engineering. The advances in cell culture technologies in recent years have quickly outpaced simple spreadsheet and database-based systems for storing media recipes and batch IDs. Today’s media technicians need software tools to consistently structure data about media recipes, ingredients and batches, so it can be easily accessed and queried on demand.

LabKey Biologics provides essential tools to help protein engineering teams overcome key challenges in cell culture media development, including:

Detailed Recipe Registration

Registering a recipe in LabKey Biologics allows technicians to specify all of the information needed for its execution including ingredients, ingredient concentrations, steps for creating the mixture, expiration time, and other key aspects. The system also allows the creation of mixtures that contain other mixtures, even when you don’t know all of their underlying concentrations or ingredients (as is often the case with vendor-supplied mixtures).

Media technicians have a number of different methods available for registering media recipes, depending on their complexity and scale. Technicians can create recipes individually using the media registration UI or they can register many recipes at once using bulk upload features or programmatic registration via LabKey Biologics API.

Consistent Batch Preparation

LabKey Biologics helps minimize formulation errors by auto-calculating the amounts for each ingredient in a recipe based on a target mixture amount. As a technician prepares a batch of mixture, they are prompted to input the actual amount of each ingredient used, as well as the raw material ID. If the media technician needs to use multiple bottles of a raw ingredient to fulfill the formulation, the system will allow them to register multiple raw materials for a single ingredients.

Following the Media Trail

The structured data captured in LabKey Biologics allows R&D teams to track the complete lineage of each individual sample, and present lineage as a visualization or grid. Sample characteristics, assay results, and relevant media details are tied together allowing media technicians to troubleshoot problematic raw materials, better optimize their batches, and improve upon media recipes to improve protein yield.

With the right tools, cell culture media technicians can consistently produce media batches and iterate media recipes to maximize performance. Request a demo to see this functionality in action and learn more about how LabKey Biologics can help accelerate your biotherapeutic R&D.

The focus of pharmaceutical and biotech research has seen a significant shift in recent years. Many research teams are no longer driving towards building small molecules, but are instead focused on designing new protein-based therapeutics. Protein engineers at these organizations are often responsible for the structural design of target molecules as well as the experimental protein production and characterization of their designs.

To support this work, protein engineers need biologics software tools to capture details about molecular components such as proteins, antibodies, plasmids and cell lines, as well as the detailed steps of the development process. LabKey Biologics provides an easy to use system for centralizing this information and additional tools to help facilitate protein design including:

Uniqueness Verification

There are a number of entities that might be critical for a research organization to register in a bioregistry. These could include:

• Protein Sequences
• Nucleotide Sequences
• Molecules (ex: Antibodies)
• Plasmids
• Cell Lines

Each of these entities is checked for uniqueness when they are registered in LabKey Biologics.  This prevents dirty data caused by duplicate records and reduces duplicate work for protein engineers. Uniqueness checks are in place for all entity types, whether you are registering a single sequence or a molecule composed of multiple protein sequences.

Uniqueness checks are also run on data auto-registered during the import of a GenBank file. In that case, LabKey Biologics will register plasmids during the import of a GenBank file, but also auto-register any regions that translate to protein sequences. If a protein sequence already exists, the system will register only the relationship between the plasmid and that protein sequence, not create a new sequence.

Classification by Protein Engineers

LabKey Biologics includes a classification engine that can identify, predict, and calculate various characteristics of registered molecules. This saves protein engineers valuable time manually assigning classifications.

The system automatically detects many regions and features of protein sequences including leader sequences, variable regions, constant regions, and CDRs. LabKey Biologics can also be trained to recognize additional sequence classifications, for example, by registering a leader sequences as a “Leader” within the system, it will recognize future leader sequences that match it.

LabKey Biologics can also recognize heavy chains and light chains and predict their type,  based on the amino acid sequence of a registered protein, as well as the isotype of the overall antibody.

For all of these classifications, whether LabKey Biologics is detecting subsequences on the amino acid sequence or the type of overall sequences, the protein engineer can always override the classification engine if the prediction is incorrect.

Integration with Other Systems

Often times, protein engineers are using another application to design proteins or plasmids. LabKey Biologics makes it easy to bring this data into the system, either via APIs or by bulk upload. Regardless of the registration method, the same classification and uniqueness checking features apply to all registered entities.

To see this functionality in action, request a demo! To learn more about LabKey Biologics check out our documentation and resources on the LabKey Support Portal.

When analyzing biologics assay data, scientists often need to look beyond the results at related data to answer their research questions. Comparing lineage characteristics like which expression system was used to generate an experiment sample or details about the sample itself, such as the buffer used in it, can uncover crucial data patterns and insights.

This type of data exploration requires data to be captured in a structured manner and integrated into a central system where it can be easily accessed, queried, and analyzed.

Structuring Data for Maximum Value

LabKey Biologics provides tools to ensure that data is correctly structured and consistently stored. For each data type within the LabKey Biologics application, users are able to configure a specific structure, indicating the names of fields as well as their type. Because this data is consistently structured, a user can pull together relevant data from different sources for an integrated view of their data during analysis.

For example, when looking at the results for a specific assay type, such as optical density, a user can add details about the samples themselves to the assay results data grid. This might include the buffer used, the expression system used to create it, or the name of the antibody (or other molecule) that was being produced.

Customized Data Views for Quicker Access

Users can customize the default assay data grid view to include these additional look-up columns. Customized default views provide quick access to all the data relevant to the user’s research, instead of having to join data each time they view the dataset. Users can also sort, filter, and search the data in these additional columns the same way they can with native assay data fields.[vc_cta h2=””]To see this functionality in action, request a demo! To learn more about LabKey Biologics check out our documentation and resources on the LabKey Support Portal. [/vc_cta]