Lab Organization for Dummies
One of the most popular New Year’s resolutions is undoubtedly to get organized. Once the holidays are over, magazines with tips to “declutter your closet” fly off the shelves, and shiny personal planners top people’s shopping lists. Everyone seems to see room for improvement in this area, and researchers are no exception. After all, wasn’t it a scientist who discovered the second law of thermodynamics, the notion that life is destined for disorder?
A lack of organization is more than an annoyance -- it can be costly, both in terms of time and money. Academic research labs in the United States have a combined $30 billion a year budget, yet their expense tracking, inventory management and data collection relies on an antiquated system of handwritten notes, emails and the occasional spreadsheet. For Cam Patterson, M.D., M.B.A, that wasn’t good enough. He hired computer guru Rob Lineberger and lab technician Holly McDonough to create a web-based system to help his lab run more smoothly. As a result, his New Year’s resolution morphed into a company called Dyzen that now provides services to a number of labs across campus.
One of the most popular New Year’s resolutions is undoubtedly to get organized. Once the holidays are over, magazines with tips to “declutter your closet” fly off the shelves, and shiny personal planners top people’s shopping lists. Everyone seems to see room for improvement in this area, and researchers are no exception. After all, wasn’t it a scientist who discovered the second law of thermodynamics, the notion that life is destined for disorder?
A lack of organization is more than an annoyance -- it can be costly, both in terms of time and money. Academic research labs in the United States have a combined $30 billion a year budget, yet their expense tracking, inventory management and data collection relies on an antiquated system of handwritten notes, emails and the occasional spreadsheet. For Cam Patterson, M.D., M.B.A, that wasn’t good enough. He asked computer guru Rob Lineberger and lab technician Holly McDonough to create a web-based system to help his lab run more smoothly. As a result, his New Year’s resolution morphed into a company called Dyzen that now provides services to a number of labs across campus.
A Freezer by Any Other Name
"Researchers go into science because they have a passion for finding solutions to problems, not because they want to run a small business,” said Patterson. “We wanted to develop a system that would streamline the business of running a lab and give PIs more time to do the fun stuff like securing grants, writing papers and forging collaborations.”
Other software does exist with that purpose in mind, but Patterson and Lineberger think they all miss the mark. Those systems focus on the data a laboratory wants to track, generating very cut-and-dried columns of numbers that essentially amount to glorified spreadsheets. Instead, the UNC researchers designed the software that is Dyzen’s namesake to be more intuitive and engaging to the user.
“Our tactic is almost like Harold and the Purple Crayon, it asks for your vision and makes it reality,” said Lineberger. “We thought in terms of how to visualize the space and get information out of it. That led us to come up with creative ways of naming the freezers and storage units, and making it so the Web labels actually match physical labels in the lab. It is almost like kindergarten, where you do things like put your shoes under the apple tree or keep your backpack in the ladybug cubby. It makes staying organized fun.”
The Dyzen application creates the look and feel of a virtual lab, customized to reflect all the freezers, desks, shelves -- you name it -- in each space. As researchers click through the Web-based program, they feel as if they are physically navigating their own lab, opening freezers and boxes, and looking in drawers and on shelves. To help visualize the space, the system asks users to name all their refrigerators, freezers and other storage units. Though coming up with a moniker for a freezer may not be as exciting as naming a star or a gene, it is still a way that people can put a stamp on their labs.
For instance, the Patterson lab named everything after Grateful Dead song titles. They have a huge trunk freezer called Bertha, another freezer called China Cat Sunflower and a liquid nitrogen tank called Dark Star. Identifying places with names makes finding things easier, like using mneumonics to remember people you meet at a cocktail party.
“Now if you say an item is in the Sunflower box in Bertha, people don’t even have go to the site, because they already know exactly where it is,” said Lineberger. “That is really the idea, because software shouldn’t be something you are a slave to, it should be something you can access, search, and then continue with your research.”
At first, Lineberger and his colleagues were satisfied with keeping their new lab management system to themselves. But then other researchers started to take notice. They would stop by to borrow a particular reagent -- as neighbors often do – and marvel at how quickly they could track it down. So many researchers were asking for the application for their labs that the Patterson group began to realize they had a marketable product.
From Virtual to Reality
They sought advice from Carolina KickStart, a program within the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute that helps scientists commercialize their inventions. NC TraCS is UNC’s home of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), a national consortium created to make biomedical research faster, cheaper and more efficient. Through KickStart, the researchers were connected to entrepreneur-in-residence Perry Genova, Ph.D., who Lineberger credits as being absolutely central to the formation of the company.
“We gave him our elevator pitch over sushi one night, and he went through it with a fine-tooth comb and told us what made sense and what didn’t, giving us unbiased feedback and mentorship. If it hadn’t been for that, we wouldn’t be here right now as a company. We have talked with NC TraCS several times, and every time we do, we get a clearer idea of how to talk about our business.”
One of the first customers to benefit from that business was Jude Samulski, Ph.D., director of the UNC Gene Therapy Center. When he hired a new lab manager, Karen Hogan, in 2009, he asked her to see if the system could bring some order to his lab. Hogan now uses the software to organize samples and reagents, keep track of orders, store presentations and publications and communicate with the lab about upcoming meetings. She says Dyzen has forced her to become organized at a new level, which is a good thing when running a lab with a couple dozen members and significant grant funding.
The Samulski lab decided to name all of their storage units after countries -- first frozen ones, then favorites. Greenland, Chile and Italy are now neighbors, residing in the same room. Five steps down the hall and on the left you’ll find Japan and Thailand. And way off in another building sits Canada.
“For me, with my fading memory at the age of 52, I don’t know how I would keep up with all this stuff,” said Hogan, who loves that everything entered on the site is searchable and can be linked to pertinent information like presentations and publications. “Thank God I have this system to help me keep up -- I just wish I had had it all along in every single lab I’ve been in!”
Now that the lab is better organized, people can find and access what they need for their experiments without wasting time searching for old reagents or, even worse, starting from scratch. That degree of organization required an initial investment, though. For example, it took Hogan a year working in her free time just to organize the 12,000 samples in one liquid nitrogen tank. But then Dyzen employees designed a program to import those thousands of samples into the system in a matter of hours, which would have taken days to enter manually. Lab members now can locate those critical samples quickly, with the touch of a button.
“It really is what you make of it,” said fourth-year graduate student Sarah Nicolson. “Karen put a ton of time into it, so now it is an amazing resource for the lab.”
Time is Money
A popular feature of the Dyzen app pertains to lab ordering. The system creates a custom lab catalog that tracks items that need to be ordered, those that have already been placed and the location of those that have arrived. Before, lab members typically wrote order requests on dry erase boards or slips of paper, a rather ineffective method prone to human error. For example, there are close to 300 different types of Fetal Bovine Serum – a key ingredient in the concoction used to culture mammalian cells. If a lab worker orders the wrong batch of FBS, it may not work or could even have the opposite effect. Researchers can use Dyzen to keep track of the catalog numbers of the exact items they have ordered and click on hyperlinks to take them back to those items the next time they need to purchase them, improving both speed and accuracy.
“It saves me so much time because I never have to pour through catalogs looking for things I normally order because I have a record of everything ordered including catalog numbers, vendors and the location of the reagent stored in the lab,” said Hogan. “Plus I can track what grant number every single thing was ordered under and keep up with how much money we have left from each funding source.”
The application can save not only time, but also money. For instance, last year the business office in the McAllister Heart Institute mandated that all labs cut their expenses in half. In response, the Patterson lab came up with a financial goal and devised a graphic to show how much they have been spending – both as individuals and as an entire lab -- in relation to their goal. By tracking their spending they were able to rectify a number of inefficiencies and have consistently cut their spending by 50% every month.
Bad Project
One of the biggest inefficiencies in lab management stems from the inevitable revolving door of rotation students, graduates students and postdocs. As those transients flow through the lab, a certain amount of knowledge and expertise is lost in the process. Many graduate students struggle to pick up the pieces of half-cooked projects as exiting researchers move on to fellowships or academic posts. The YouTube video “Bad Project,” a spoof of pop singer Lady Gaga’s tune "Bad Romance," has immortalized their frustrations:
“Your tubes aren’t labeled, your lab book’s a mess, and it all gives me such incredible stress,” the song goes. “Can’t read this protocol, it’s written in Thai. What’s in this box? What, what, what is in this box!?”
When Samulski grad student Stacy Foti finished her Ph.D., she was determined not to leave a bad project behind. Foti had generated 200 different glycerol stocks, frozen samples of reagents necessary to generate the genetically engineered viruses used for gene therapy. Before she left, she labeled every single tube and entered them into Dyzen, describing exactly how she made them and linking to the genetic sequence associated with each.
Now her legacy isn’t languishing in some freezer-burned corner of the lab but is being built upon by other researchers who have the critical resources they need to continue – not repeat -- Foti’s experiments. It has been translated into a saving of months of work in their lab.
“Our lab has 2,000 samples, and if they had all been curated like this, we would run so much better,” said Hogan. “Perhaps one day we will.”
