Sample Management in Compound Management

At Ziath we know that an academic and research lab without a sample management system in place can be a chaotic environment. New technologies in research have led to dramatic increases of experimental throughput as well as much more collaboration between different labs. Yet, often labs still leave the responsibility of biorepository documentation and information management to individual lab members, with no cohesive system in place. In modern cases of large throughput or collaborative labs, the traditional approaches of using spreadsheets and notebooks are not suitable for recording and tracking the circulation of sample data.

We are also aware that research work is tedious and error-prone being dynamic and in constant flux. Groups expand and combine, projects are revised and repurposed, which only increases the importance of effective sample management. Often the inheritors of a project will have to duplicate samples or remake reagents unnecessarily. Useful samples will be discarded because of ambiguous IDs or illegible labeling. Sample databases can be incomplete or non-existent.