Key Concepts
Key concepts for getting the most out of Lab Atlas
Last updated
Key concepts for getting the most out of Lab Atlas
Last updated
Lab Atlas captures and manages your work using a managed hierarchy of several entities: organizations, projects, studies, and assays. There is enough flexibility in the application to allow you to define & use these entities in almost any way you'd like, but by keeping the following concepts in mind, you will get the most out of Lab Atlas's features.
The organization is the top-level entity in Lab Atlas. Organizations include all of the users you have invited & all of the projects, studies, and assays that they have defined. User roles (such as standard user, power user, and organization admin) are assigned at the organization level. Integrations with external services, such as cloud storage or electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) are also defined at the organization level. Only users that have been invited into your organization may view its contents. It is possible for a user to be a member of more than one organization, but organization creation may be restricted, depending on the tenant context (eg. labatlas.com versus self-hosted).
Projects are loosely defined as long-running efforts by individual users or teams to deliver on organization-level goals. These can be drug discovery projects, broader research efforts (eg. target identification), or house-keeping work (eg. animal facility care or lab maintenance). Projects are top-level entities in Lab Atlas, but have little metadata associated with them, other than a name, description, code (used for deriving study codes), and visibility setting. This visibility setting defines how non-project-team-members may interact-with the project. Projects primarily serve as buckets for collecting work, which are defined as studies & tasks. They have no defined start or end and are generally assumed to be continuous efforts, until they are marked as complete or inactive.
Studies are the primary unit of work in Lab Atlas, intended to be finite efforts to complete a specific goal or answer a specific question. Studies can be used to capture long-running experiments (such as animal studies), or short-term activities (such as processing sequencing data). What work a study actually consists of is entirely up to the team performing it. To support this flexibility, only a minimal set of information is required when registering a new study in Lab Atlas:
The parent Project the study is associated with
A name
A description of the study objective
List of study team members
Start date
Additional information can be provided, but it is not required. For more granular activity and record tracking, one-or-more assays or tasks can be created within studies.
Assays represent smaller units of work defined within studies and allow for the capture of more specific experiment metadata, which is enabled through user-defined Assay Types. Assay types are reusable assay templates that allow you to categorize the assay to be performed in flexible ways (eg. histology, sequencing, or plate-based screen), add additional form inputs that users must fill-in when creating the assay, and predefining a list of tasks to be completed during the course of the assay. The use of assay types ensures that commonly-executed assays will have their metadata captured consistently and reliably.
Study codes are unique identifiers generated every time a new study is registered in Lab Atlas. They are intended both to identify study records within Lab Atlas, as well as outside it, to help tie project information together throughout your information ecosystem. Study codes are generated by combining an alphanumeric prefix, defined by the project, and a numerical suffix, representing the count of studies within the project. Assays are also assigned assay codes, which are a concatenation of the parent study code and a numerical counter representing the total number of assays within the parent project. Studies or assays that have added external collaborators are also given a second external code, which strips away project-specific identifiers, to allow for sharing outside of your organization.
Lab Atlas allows you to share data & documents with your colleagues by bundling cloud storage with each subscription and allowing you to bring your own cloud storage providers with you. Have a SharePoint site or Amazon S3 bucket you want to share with your colleagues? Connect your Microsoft and Amazon Web Services accounts to lab atlas to enable file sharing and storage for your projects. File storage access permissions mirror those of your projects, allowing you to keep your sensitive documents private, while enabling easier sharing with trusted colleagues.
Tasks allow you to record additional information about the progress being made in studies and assays. Maybe you want to break them down into simple step-by-step processes, or maybe you just want to be notified when certain tasks have been accomplished. With tasks, you can create simple To-Do lists for your studies & assays, assign them to team members, and capture metadata & files when they are completed.
Lab Atlas Notes is a simple and powerful way to capture rich-text documents directly in the app and share them with your colleagues. Capture meeting notes, protocols, or observations in an easy-to-use text editor and choose who you share them with. Notes are not intended to replace your existing electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), but rather server as a place to store all of the documents that might otherwise fall through the cracks and be lost on personal devices or in peoples' heads.
