CultureTrax in action

In addition to sharing key resources like current Protocols and Materials, CultureTrax also enables you to share both the execution and the results of your experimental work with colleagues in the lab. Anyone in your lab group can be made a collaborator on a Culture Track, with the ability to both review results and even execute and record lab work on your behalf. Because your resources and experiments are presented in a standard and detailed format, you have a high degree of assurance that the work can be done correctly. This was demonstrated in an NIH-funded, controlled lab study, which showed scientists using CultureTrax had dramatically better success replicating a cell culture protocol they had not run previously.

The figure below shows a hypothetical, complex, collaborative experiment that can be fully planned and documented using CultureTrax. In this example, source fibroblasts from individual patients are reprogrammed by one scientist into iPSCs, which are cryopreserved and stored in a cell bank. Secure links to the medical and genomic data for each patient are attached to their source cell notes in the software. A second scientist expands iPSCs from the bank, which are differentiated into two type of cells using two different protocols and combined using another protocol into a disease model to test new drugs by a third scientist. Any lab researcher finding an interesting analytical result in this experiment could use the automatic data linkages in CultureTrax to quickly reference the medical and genomic data about the individual who provided the original source cells or images from the differentiation protocols. This example shows the power of the automatic linking of culture histories with analytical results provided by CultureTrax.