Lab Storage, ELN and Temperature Monitoring at University of Luxembourg

Presentation

The Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) is accelerating biomedical research by closing the link between systems biology and medical research. Neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease, metabolomics and disease network analysis are in the focus of LCSB's research.

The LCSB has put in place a support group to enable the researchers to focus on their research. All the logistics of about 250 researchers is organized by the Support biotech team using the LabCollector LIMS software. A reagent to buy, equipment to book, a sample to find… everything runs smoothly in a few clicks.

Equipped since 2011 with a full version of LabCollector and the Electronic Lab Notebook, we have progressively developed the software by adding:

• Customizable modules, for example one for labcoats management (clean out/clean back) used with mobile device.
• Add-on Scheduler
• Add-on Data Logger
• Groups to manage our constant evolution in term of scientific projects

Equipment and Monitoring

LabCollector has helped us to list all the equipment in laboratories, from the pipette to the microscope, and in particular to manage their maintenance and reservation. Via the Equipment module, we have listed a thousand equipment items, including 150 machines for cold storage. Directly via this module, researchers can find the equipment needed for their experimentation and reserve it.

Since recently, we finished the monitoring of cold storage equipment and begin to monitor our incubators. We are now about 200 devices equipped with sensors for temperature, humidity, pressure, etc. The persons responsible for the maintenance of these facilities are directly alerted by email and GSM if temperature is outside thresholds.

Purchase Order Management

Our logistic group is responsible of purchase order management, shipment organization, common disposables ordering, delivery and dispatching, and budget follow up. Using LabCollector for all these time-consuming but indispensable processes helps us to better manage the large number of orders: more than 6,000 for 2015 with 84 different budgets.

Moreover, in 2016, our university changed all the system of budget management. We are now dealing with about 150 budget codes and AgileBio team has been responsive to their implementation.

News for 2016 and More

ELN — Even if we purchased the Electronic Lab Notebook in 2011, it's only now that researchers attempt to deal with it. Since 2016, a new version is, in our opinion, more accessible and easy to use. We will try again!

Zebrafish Aquarium — Our Zebrafish breeding responsible is currently evaluating the Aquarium add-on to manage all the aspect in this type of breeding: management of racks, fish identity card, fish in/out, and documentation… Some adjustments will probably be necessary but the add-on already meets many of our criteria.