In today’s fast-paced biotechnology R&D processes, keeping track of the resources is very important for successful laboratory management. TeselaGen helps you manage your automated lab by keeping careful track of essential materials, which becomes especially important when working with large-scale automation processes. In this article, we will see and understand the usage of TeselaGen’s Lab Inventory Management System.

The Inventory can be found on the left panel. You can have different types of materials, which have the typical library view:

The detailed information on each library depends on the type of material.

It is important to understand that materials on the Inventory follow a hierarchy: certain biological materials carry information derived from DNA sequences or their daughter amino acid sequences.

By using a Lab Inventory Management System (LIMS) you can get automated tracking of complex reactions and workflows. You can set things up virtually to automatically update the status of your physical inventory after a workflow is done, which allows you to link the update of your experiments to a real trackable location in inventory.

As you may have noticed on the Materials Registry, a material is linked to a theoretical entry on TeselaGen’s system (i.e. a DNA material can be linked to a DNA sequence or DNA Part), but, what’s the difference between a material and a sample? You can think of a Material as the somewhat abstract idea of a biological entity, while the sample is the physical thing that exists. The general hierarchy of entries must be summarized as follows:

Next, let’s briefly explain each type of entry available on your Inventory Management System, their uses, and specific information on each one of them.

Samples are physical (“real”) materials you have on a plate/tube/etc. stored on a shelf, freezer, rack, or any other physical space in your laboratory. When opening a Sample from the library, you can see the sequence map, aliquots of this sample, and design lineage.

To create a new Sample, just click on the “New” icon as on the rest of the libraries, however, notice that to create it you’ll need to indicate a material linked to this sample. Keep in mind that you need to previously register a material (and of course a theoretical entity before creating a new sample!).

Just as you would do in the lab, an aliquot is a small portion of a sample (so it’s one step down on the hierarchy). On the Aliquots library, you can see the general information of it, as well as locate its linked sample, material, and even the physical location in your laboratory.

If you want to create a new aliquot, you’ll notice that it’s not possible to create them from the library. Instead, you need to look for the material where it comes from (found on the Materials Registry) and then create it using the “New aliquot” option.

An aliquot entry can have an associated location so you can verify where you can physically find it. Whether it’s a plate or a tube, TeselaGen’s software will display a representation of its location:

These plates/tubes can also be organized in different locations (see the later Tubes section). If you change the location of an aliquot, simply use the “reassign aliquot” option to relocate it.

Reagents can also be added to your LIMS. Just as with any other data storage library, you have the typical view:

For this case, you can manually add a reagent lot by selecting from the available reagents. The reagents library allows you to enter data for individual reagents, or to batch uploads of many reagents at once

TeselaGen’s LIMS allows you to register several plate types. When opening the library you get the same view as the rest of the libraries, let’s focus on what you see when opening an entry:

Double-click on one of the plate wells to open the aliquot contained there, or assign a new one (if it’s empty). Below this, you can see the content and location of the aliquots contained in your plate:

A Tube entry will show you basic information such as its volume capacity, content, and rack location.

Below, you can see a representation of the content of the tube, and the information of the additives added.

An Additive is a reagent that is added to a reaction well or sample aliquot as part of a workflow. It does not have quite the same status as an aliquot since we are not so worried about tracking (it does not contain genetic information for example). We may want to keep track of its depletion as a matter of course though, so we are warned before we run out and can replenish our supply.

You can add additives directly from a tube’s information, you just need to indicate the reagent that will be used as an additive, and its volume and concentration.

As you may have noticed, you can indicate the physical location of your plates, tubes, racks, etc. on the LIMS using the Freezer & Equipment Management Toolkit. For this article, we’ll just keep in mind that you can edit the location of your entries, however, to create new racks or freezers, you’ll need to go deeper into the Freezer & Equipment Management options to see them available on your LIMS.