There are different types of biological data you can work with using TeselaGen's system. Following the Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) cycle, you can incorporate sequences, oligos, parts, features, and annotations into your designs. Once you take them into the lab, our Lab Inventory Management System (LIMS) contains all the information about your physical materials, including your facilities and how you store samples, reagents, and aliquots on freezers and equipment in the lab.

All entries for a specific type of entry are stored in a library. As you can see in the image, all of the DNA Sequences in a project. Libraries are the databases containing all of your data, which you can import and export into other formats (as CSV). By clicking on an entry, more information is displayed describing it; the information shown will depend on the type of entry, but what if you need more information about it?

Sometimes you need to add more information to your entries. For example, in our DNA sequences library, we may need to add accession numbers, indicate if it's codon-optimized for a specific organism, etc. Even though the complete list of features to be added for an entry doesn't include this information, we can add it using extended properties.

Extended properties are a great way to add a new column of data to the library. Let's see how to use them using this InvF entry. Notice how the accession number is indicated on the name of the entry because there is no specific field to indicate it.

To add this new information, let's open the entry and go to Update > Update Extended Properties.

Since we haven't defined any type of extended properties for this type of data, the pop-up window is indicating us that there are no extended properties to add. To create a new type of extended property, let's click on "Extended Properties Settings".

This will take us to this screen (we can also go to Settings under TeselaGen Settings). Here, we will click on New Extended Property.

There are several types of extended properties depending on what we want to add. For this case, we will select the basic type.

Here we can specify which information we need to add and the name of our new field to add.

After hitting "Submit", if we go back to our DNA Sequence and try to add a new extended property, the "Accession Number" we just created will now appear on the list.

After selecting it, now we just fill in the information and click on "OK" to add the new field to our entry.

Now, our entry has more information! Notice in the lower part that a new list of all the extended properties is shown.

Another way of using the extended properties is to link entries. When adding a new type of extended property, we can select "link" (as we did before on this article). Let's see how to use them with one example:

We will use this BBa_ B0010 sequence. This time we will righ-click on it and select the corresponding option to add an extended property.

On this case, we will add an extended property we previously set (following the steps explained above) to add Linked Sequences.

This will show you the list of sequences (or other entities if specified when creating the extended property). Here we can select as much sequences as we want.

🚨NOTE: The entities displayed here will only be the ones belonging to the project you are currently working in.

After selecting and hitting the "Add extended property" button, we can click on "Ok" to see the new extended properties in our entry:

Remember that you can link any other type of entities by selecting it when setting a new extended property.