Many stem cell scientists experience challenges reproducing protocols they have not previously run. Much of this difficulty arises from incomplete documentation of highly complex protocols and associated material recipes in typical scientific publications and other source documents. In addition, troubleshooting new protocols is difficult using paper lab notebooks, in which it is time-consuming to capture and later find critical details.

Here we report on a controlled laboratory study of the impact of the CultureTrax® software on how successfully stem cell scientists could reproduce and document a protocol they had not seen previously.