It’s a familiar story in cell culture labs all over the world.  Someone in the lab starts performing cryovial inventory and stumbles across a batch of cells with no provenance.  You, the PI, have a vague recollection of a line that over-expressed a protein that showed promise in relation to keeping the cell culture undifferentiated.  You had planned to sit down with your post doc and design some confirmatory experiments but, well, things happen.   

Eighteen months pass.  There’s been turnover in the lab. The culture information and original test data for these cells is somewhere in the dozens of notebooks and hard drives kept in the lab. The information on the cryovial label doesn’t give you a starting point. How much time will you and your lab members spend looking through notebooks and interpreting information that may or may not be complete? Will the data on the hard drives, assuming you can find it, still be accessible?  

This common scenario paints a picture of the expense in time, money, and frustration when data records are locked in manual notebooks or stored in multiple locations. Searching is expensive, a troublesome burden to scientists and creates a situation where valuable data is exposed to loss or attrition.  

A single bottle of complete stem cell media can cost upwards of $450 and a single 6 well plate orT-75 uses 15 mls a day. Expanding a culture sufficiently to cryopreserve a usable number of vials can take upwards of 3-5 weeks. Factor in lost time,effort, other consumables, and the IP that was lost and a simple math exercise will tell you how much money could have been saved using CultureTrax to track and record your cell culture.

Elegantly designed digital tools alleviate the lost time and frustration spent searching for the cell culture and testing data.With CultureTrax, cell culture data, including specific material lot information, cell count, images, and observational data, is linked over time,along with the ability to link to outside analytical data and summary information. All the information, data summaries and linkages to the raw data is stored in a centralized location that is accessible anywhere at any time. The data from former lab members is easily accessible using the collaboration feature and,with the standardized format for recording data on the platform, there is no more guessing to fill in missing information or need to decipher handwritten notes. 

CultureTrax;the single location that fulfills all your lab’s data storage and retrieval needs.   

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