Keeping track of essential materials becomes especially important when working with large-scale automation processes. TeselaGen's platform incorporates a Lab Inventory Management System to register your physical materials and link them to the theoretical entities associated; all of those Materials can be used in your Workflows to be automatically updated as you run a protocol. For example, when carrying out a microbial transformation, the newly transformed strain can be added to your strains list, and the plate containing it will be added to your inventory indicating details on what it containsand the Material Lineage (this is, the "history" or series of steps followed to track back the origin of that material).

To achieve this level of automation, it is very important to keep our inventory up to date in your LIMS. On this article, we'll see how to create an inventory from scratch, by either adding entries manually or in bulk, or automating processes for materials to be added.

The first step is to add a Location. In TeselaGen's LIMS, a Location is the physical facility where you will register the items in your inventory. You can have several locations.

Let's start by going to the Locations register on the Freezer and Equipment Management Toolkit

Once we're there, let's click on "New Location" and add the details of our lab in the pop-up window. For this hands-on, let's create a new TeselaGen location:

🚨NOTE: Sites indicate the specific address of a location, and a location type is a customizable field (for example, you can indicate if it's a lab, room, floor, etc). Both can be edited by admin users.

The equipment library contains different types of laboratory equipment that can store samples (for example, freezers, ovens, centrifuges, etc.). For this tutorial, let's start adding a freezer to our inventory by going to the Freezer Management library on the

Freezer and Equipment Management Toolkit. There, we'll fill in the information about our freezer and locate it in the location we just created.

Before continuing, the system needs us to select at least one container. Containers represent shelves, racks, or drawers used to organize materials inside your freezer. Let's create some to organize our -80°C Freezer:

Under our freezer information, we have the option to add several containers (horizontal divisions). Each container can have positions (original divisions of it) or other containers inside it like racks and drawers (those will be added as the horizontal divisions).

Now, our freezer with all of its containers is set up. Notice that all the containers we indicated are now show as folders (this is useful to keep the organization of our data).

Now that we have our lab and freezer registered, let's start populating them!

Let's create a plate from scratch. To do so, let's go to the Plates section of our Inventory and click on the "New Plate" button.

Here, we added a 96-well plate. If we don't select the "Assign to location" option, a plate will be created without placement (this can be changed on the plate entry from the library). For this case, we will select it, which will bring us to the next window:

Here, we will choose to place it manually, and then the folders of our freezer containers will appear for us to select where we want to place it:

We just created an empty plate, but now, let's add content to the wells. Remember that the Materials Registry entries are entities that do not physically exist. To locate something inside a well we can either go to its material entry on

Let's add a sample of this DHQ2 DNA Material by clicking on the "Create Aliquot" option. This can be also done by right-clicking the entry on the complete list on the library.

Once our aliquot is created, let's open its entry on the Aliquots library and click on the "Assign Aliquot" option.

A pop-up window will appear where we'll have to indicate where we want to place it. To assign this aliquot to our plate, let's select Plate>Stock Plate and click on "Submit".

Now, our aliquot is located in the plate we just created.

Let's add a plate with many aliquots by going to our plates library and clicking on "Upload". On the pop-up window, we will download the example CSV file and then fill it in with the information about our new plate.

Our CSV file should look like this:

We can then upload the CSV, and our new plate will be part of our inventory. We can also build the file directly on the platform. For example, if we go to DNA Materials library > Upload > Build CSV file, we will see this window:

However, this process may be thorough and difficult if we need to add larger lists of materials. Now, let's see how to automate these processes to make them faster and more efficient.

TeselaGen's Lab Inventory Management System (LIMS) integrates your processes in the lab to automate your Inventory updates. Instead of manually adding materials to your new freezer, you can plan and execute different protocols, which will update all the materials and reagents you use and create, and create a material lineage diagram to easily follow where a material on a plate or tube comes from.

First, we will launch the Create Plate Map Tool and select a 24-well plate and as many samples as we need. For this example, we will select 24 samples.

Then, we will select how to order our materals on the plate. Here we have selected "Distribute by Table order".

Once we finish the process, we have our plate map. However, this is only a virtual representation of a plate (which can be used for different purposes), but it doesn't represent a physical plate yet. To do it, we need to launch the Plate Registration Tool, which will register a plate from the plate map we just created:

Here we can also specify the volume to add and the concentration of each aliquot in our plate:

Then, we will click on "Next" and "Register Plates" on the next window. After this, our plate is created! In the last window of the tool, we can click on "output plates created" or look for it on the Plates library, and we can change its location by clicking on "Move Plate" and selecting our same Freezer.

We can add microbial materials to our inventory after a transformation process. To do it, we will launch the Microbial Transformation Tool; we'll use the same Stock Plate we manually created:

For this transformation, we will use 50 uL of bacteria with 10 uL of DNA, which we indicate on the "Transformation prep" step.

🚨 NOTE: Before doing this process, we need to have a microbal material previosuly registered in the LIMS.

Just like in the previous step, this tool creates a microbial plate, a microbial transformation reaction map, and a microbial transformation worklist, but our transformed microbes are not yet in our inventory.

To complete the process, we need to launch the Execute Worklist Tool. If we do it from the confirmation window above, this will automatically select our outputs. We will then click on Execute Worklist, and our cells are ready!

After launching it, our new transformed microbial material will be placed on a new plate, however, we can go to the plate information by clicking on the hyperlink of it (shown in the image above) and use the "Move" option to relocate it in our Freezer.

After doing this, now our plate is located in our freezer! We could also only relocate the aliquot as we did before.

The Aliquot Rearray Tool allows us to rearrange aliquots already in our inventory. This time, we will launch the tool and select a couple of aliquots to be added to our Stock Plate.

After selecting them, a preview of what our plate would look like will be shown. For this case, we will move 25 μL of our materials.

This tool could also give us warnings. For example, here we got a warning! If we display it, the warning is telling us that the transfer volume would go below the dead volume locations (that would leave our original aliquot locations empty). On this case, we want to transfer the entire volume, so we would just continue with the process.

Just like the last tool we used, this will generate a Worklist which we can run using the Execute Worklist Tool. While doing it, the system will again warns you about the volume we are transferring.

Once the worklist is executed, we're done!

We just moved a plate, but what if we want to automate this task? Let's use the Move Inventory Tool. Here, we can select the plate(s) we want to move. For this case, we will select one of our PCR reagents rack that we already have in our inventory.

After clicking on "Submit" a pop-up window will appear for us to select where to put our plate. Here, we will select "Place Manually" as we have no placement strategies defined.

Here, we will select our same Freezer, and after that our plate will be successfully relocated!

This tool will also generate a placement list, which is basically a data table containing all the information from the tool we just ran.

All of the Tools we have used so far can be one step more of complex processes. Notice how after running a Tool, it automatically suggests a Tool that may be useful for your next steps (i.e. Execute Worklist tool). For example, we can create new plates to later rearray aliquots on them and then use the materials for PCRs or transformation, whose products will later be added to other plates.

All of these experiments will use and create materials from our inventory, and TeselaGen can help you put them together by creating a Workflow to automatically run one tool after the other, to connect your experimental planning with your LIMS and automate all of your experimental protocols.