Taking your lab digital: What to know about bringing electronic lab notebook technology into your R&D lab

Understanding the ways an electronic lab notebook platform connects your R&D lab and how Benchling makes ELN integration easy

If you’re considering bringing electronic lab notebook (ELN) technology into your life science R&D lab, you may be wondering what software platforms and instruments you will be able to connect it to and how easy that connection will be to make and maintain. While the answer to those questions will definitely vary by platform, the questions themselves highlight one of the challenges you’ll find with many ELNs; because most electronic lab notebooks only enable a small fraction of a life science R&D lab’s digital workflows, you need to integrate them with other software and instruments to get the full benefits of searchability, organization, and insight generation that come from going digital (read more about these benefits in Chapter 1 of this eBook, What is an electronic lab notebook?).

For many ELNs, integration requires custom coding, especially if you’re connecting to a lab information management system (LIMS). And, depending on the respective platforms, that connection can be clunky and will require updates as software and hardware platforms update.

Benchling sidesteps the need for several common types of ELN integrations

Benchling simplifies ELN integration by virtue of being more than an electronic lab notebook. Most of the functionality commonly accomplished by ELN integrations – such as inventory management, process management, and registration – are already supported by features natively built into Benchling’s unified, cloud-based platform. This gives you a seamless digital experience out of the box, across applications that would normally be distinct systems.

In addition, Benchling enables you to integrate any instrument, software, or database using our fast, reliable, and well-documented REST APIs. We’ve worked with hundreds of biotech companies to build integrations with everything from custom software, to liquid handlers, to Amazon S3 buckets, resulting in more uniform data capture, more centralized data storage, and more automated and efficient operations.

Here’s an overview of capabilities that typically have to be integrated with ELN software – but that are natively built into Benchling:

Benchling Applications:

• Notebook: The most user-friendly electronic lab notebook in the industry—reduce time to data entry by 85% with the first cloud-based notebook built for modern life science.

• Molecular Biology: A comprehensive molecular biology suite of 10+ tools in one collaborative environment—build, share, and record DNA and amino acid sequences in one unified platform.

• Registry: A convenient and easy-to-use registration system built from the ground up for large molecule R&D—model biological entities and easily enter and extract the data you need.

• Inventory: aboratory inventory management—track the locations of vials, wells, batches, and more, and automatically link results to them.

• Workflows: A digital process management platform for early research through development—organize any scientific workflow into trackable stages and test new variations to optimize your outputs.

• Insights: Easy-to-configure dashboards and reports provide a full view of R&D—everyone from scientists and managers to executives can have customized dashboards to deliver the answers that they need.

Benchling Platform:

• Lab Automation: Synchronize informatics and instrumentation to drive efficiency and maximize the potential of your full suite of molecular laboratory tools.

• Validated Cloud: Unify R&D teams for easier collaboration and data management to accelerate time-to-market while meeting compliance requirements with a modern cloud architecture and enterprise-grade security.

• Codeless Configuration: Configure and reconfigure workflows without a single line of code so you can quickly adapt and align to your evolving R&D process, resulting in rapid prototyping, full deployment, and fast time to value.

• Developer Platform: Integrate any instrument, software, and/or database with Benchling to centralize your data and enable automation. Equipped with APIs, Events, and Data Warehouse, so you can connect Benchling to existing IT infrastructure with ease.

“Benchling gives transparency across the company. Because everything is in one place, our scientists don't have to jump from system to system. They can quickly get all the details and all the data associated with any construct or experiment. By keeping a good registry of constructs and the associated assay data, we're able to extract learnings from it that we otherwise wouldn't have.”