Clarity: An Open-Source Manager for Laboratory Automation

被引:33
作者
Delaney, Nigel F. [1 ]
Echenique, Jose I. Rojas [1 ]
Marx, Christopher J. [1 ,2 ]
机构
[1] Harvard Univ, Dept Organism & Evolutionary Biol, Cambridge, MA 02143 USA
[2] Harvard Univ, Ctr Syst Biol, Fac Arts & Sci, Cambridge, MA 02143 USA
来源
JALA | 2013年 / 18卷 / 02期
基金
美国国家科学基金会;
关键词
laboratory information managements systems (LIMS); informatics and software; robotics and instrumentation engineering; HTS high-throughput screening; automated biology; ADAPTATION;
D O I
10.1177/2211068212460237
中图分类号
Q5 [生物化学];
学科分类号
071010 ; 081704 ;
摘要
Software to manage automated laboratories, when interfaced with hardware instruments, gives users a way to specify experimental protocols and schedule activities to avoid hardware conflicts. In addition to these basics, modern laboratories need software that can run multiple different protocols in parallel and that can be easily extended to interface with a constantly growing diversity of techniques and instruments. We present Clarity, a laboratory automation manager that is hardware agnostic, portable, extensible, and open source. Clarity provides critical features including remote monitoring, robust error reporting by phone or email, and full state recovery in the event of a system crash. We discuss the basic organization of Clarity, demonstrate an example of its implementation for the automated analysis of bacterial growth, and describe how the program can be extended to manage new hardware. Clarity is mature, well documented, actively developed, written in C# for the Common Language Infrastructure, and is free and open-source software. These advantages set Clarity apart from currently available laboratory automation programs. The source code and documentation for Clarity is available at http://code.google.com/p/osla/.
引用
收藏
页码:171 / 177
页数:7
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