Synbiota: An Entry-Level ELN for the Budding Scientist
Although promises of a paperless office may not have materialized yet, a bumper crop of ELNs (electronic laboratory notebooks) have been making the rounds to ease the gathering, processing, and dissemination of data. As we are constantly being reminded, without proper management, this torrent of data will soon overwhelm the scientific community with data anarchy, grinding progress to a halt and heralding in yet another Dark Age. Perhaps not, but the efficient management of projects when you have multiple students working on a summer iGEM (international genetically engineering machines team) becomes an absolute necessity, or things can quickly spiral out of control.
ELNs range from feature-laden systems that not only help you gather data and manage projects but, with accounting and inventory features, can essentially help you to manage an entire lab, to more basic systems that focus on individual and small group projects. Though still in beta mode, Synbiota is in the latter category and proves to be a good entry-level electronic lab notebook that allows those unfamiliar with this format of data recording and sharing to hit the ground running.
It comes packaged with a simple-to-use open source DNA annotation program, GENtle 2.0 beta, to help assemble your newly designed constructs. After uploading your sequence file, ...
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