OK, but what IS an ELN?
*** Before we get started, I wanted to plug two things:
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OK, back to the post ***
One of the things that has always bothered me about the term Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) is that, depending on the context, it can mean a very specific type of software or a collection of related but ultimately different tools. In fact, this was part of my motivation for developing the Biotech Reference Stack. So I though this would be a good example of how the Reference Stack teases apart some of these ambiguities (or at least tries to.)
The narrow definition of an ELN is literally just an electronic version of what you would use a paper lab notebook for: Recording what happened in the lab in a form that can be used as a reference in case you need to verify it at some point in the future. In the US before 2011, this was usually to prove that you discovered a compound before your competitors. Today, it’s more likely for tracking down data anomalies, though it may sometimes still be necessary for clinical filings, etc.
But strictly speaking, those are pretty much the only requirements for a piece of software to call itself and ELN - a glorified text editor, probably with some form of time-stamping and locking. That’s why some teams just use Notion.
But these days, many pieces of software that call themselves ELNs also come with a bunch of other functionality that works closely with the narrowly-defined lab notebooks: They track inventory. They track samples. They capture and organize structured data in custom schemas. They help you design plate maps. They let you design compounds and biologics.
Those are all part of this larger body of functionality that allow a lab to function. So it makes sense to lump them into a single category. And it’s probably even fine to call that body of functionality an ELN, as long as you have a way of distinguishing which of those pieces of functionality each particular ELN has.
And that’s the problem.
Some of these pieces of functionality have canonical names, or at least names that bench scientists will recognize. But, at least in my experience as an outsider, it can be hard for non-bench scientists to understand what they mean. And some of them don’t have canonical names even among bench scientists.
So the idea of the Biotech Reference Stack is to explicitly call out what all these pieces of functionality are. I didn’t even try to give them names because that ended up being more confusing than helpful. It’s all descriptions (at least for now…)
An ELN, broadly speaking, can mean pretty much anything in the green “Data Generation” module of the Reference Stack. (It can sometimes mean things in other parts of the Stack as well.) So as I get more ELNs and related software tagged on the Stack, I’m hoping this will become a more effective way to tell what you’re actually getting with each.
Of course, that still leaves the next obvious question: If the Data Generation module is the ELN, where’s the LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System)?
Well, I have bad news for you: The functionality that most people tend to associate with a LIMS also covers most of the Data Generation module, along with large chunks of Planning, Data Analysis and Decision Making. But that’s a topic for a future post.
Thanks for reading this week’s Scaling Biotech! I really appreciate your continued support, and I read every comment and reply.
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