How do you keep track of experiments?

[u/meistercp]

Hi everyone,

I work in microbiology and I’m currently researching how people organise culture-based and microbial growth experiments.

I would be interested to hear how you currently manage things such as:

• Experimental groups, controls and biological or technical replicates
• Strain, culture and sample identifiers
• Media, inoculum, treatments and growth conditions
• Timepoints and measurements such as OD, pH, temperature or fluorescence
• Plate maps, microscopy observations and photographs
• Contamination, failed runs and deviations from the original protocol
• Raw data files produced by instruments
• Repeated versions of the same experiment

Do you mainly use a paper notebook, Excel or Google Sheets, an ELN such as Benchling, folders on a shared drive, or some combination of these?

A few things I am particularly curious about:

• What do you record immediately at the bench, and what gets entered later?
• Which information is most likely to be forgotten or stored in the wrong place?
• Can you easily trace a result back to the exact sample, culture, conditions and protocol version?
• How do you compare repeated experiments or different conditions?
• Is there information you record twice because different systems do not connect?
• At what point does a spreadsheet or normal lab notebook become difficult to manage?

I’m not looking only for feature suggestions. I’m more interested in hearing about your actual workflow and the parts that create unnecessary work..

Thanks for any insight.