Product Bulletin: Summer 2020

Prem Mohanty
Product Marketing and Strategy

Summer is almost over and these past few months were filled with monumental change for our life science customers. Some pivoted their R&D teams to remote working, while others optimized shifts in the lab to continue operations, including many focused on COVID-19 related efforts.

Benchling released dozens of new features and enhancements across all of our applications to continue driving our mission of accelerating life sciences R&D. One feature that we’re really excited about is Worklists, which helps our customers work with large sample sets across Benchling. Read on to learn more about this and other new features below.

Worklists hits the accelerator with new productivity enhancements

What it is

Worklists is a feature of our Inventory application that helps users work with large sets of samples such as entities, batches, containers, and plates. It saves scientists time and effort by facilitating bulk actions on large numbers of samples.

What’s new

With the most recent product release, Worklists now contains user interface updates and deeper integration across applications, all designed to save time and boost productivity.

User interface enhancements

Users can now quickly remove itemsfrom the collapsed view of a Worklist, without the need to get into the expanded view to perform the same action. Users can sort through the items in a given Worklist and save their preferred sort order for the future. The column titled ‘Position’ marks the default display order of the entities in a Worklist. These updates remove the need for unnecessary clicks, help get the relevant actions done faster, and ultimately save time.

Wider scanning capabilities

The use of a barcode scanner is the fastest and easiest way to add samples to Worklists. Until recently, Benchling supported the addition of only containers through scanning. With the new update, users can now scan entities and plates directly into Worklists as well. This significantly improves the user experience and makes it convenient to work with a much larger variety of samples in the lab.Scan different sample types into Worklists

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Deeper application integration

The true power of Worklists lies in how seamlessly embedded the feature is across all Benchling applications. This helps save time for users as tedious repetitive actions are streamlined into a single action that applies across a larger set of samples. Some of the enhancements include:

Molecular Biology

Users now have the option to add selected primers to Worklists directly from the primer panel. Additionally, an option to add to a Worklist upon DNA sequence import has also been enabled.

Insights

Users can now add entities to a Worklist directly from the Insights tool.

Plate Creation table

Users can now add to a Worklist from a Plate Creation table.

Lab Automation

Users now have the option to use "Insert from worklist" and "Add from structured table" from schema-less storage_link fields in runs.

What you can do with it

Here are some examples of how the new features of Worklists can help different R&D functions.

Plasmid design

Import libraries of plasmids and add to a Worklist during the import and registration process, consolidating a typically two step process into a single step. This Worklist can be used to import all the contained plasmids into Bulk Assembly for high throughput combinatorial plasmid design. The output of a Bulk Assembly run can also be uploaded to a Worklist for further research use.

Fermentation scale up

Use an Insights dashboard to evaluate strain performance under various fermentation conditions and process parameters. Export the strain IDs from the dashboard into a Worklist. Remove any of the unwanted strains from the Worklist to create a focused list of the most promising strains. Use the Worklist to set up scale up culture runs in a Notebook entry.

In vitro testing

Scan samples from a plate into Benchling with a barcode scanner. Create assay testing Notebook entries and import samples from the Worklist into Results tables. Perform assays and record assay results against the samples. Use Insights or Registry to view and analyze assay results recorded against the samples.

Find more information about Worklists

Learn about other new features and enhancements by product

Notebook

Benchling’s Notebook was designed to promote higher quality data capture with an exceptional and intuitive user experience. Recent releases improve the usability and aesthetics of plate creation tables, tooltips, and visual cues in the product.

Molecular Biology

Benchling Molecular Biology is a cutting edge, in silico design tool that supports the latest scientific workflows. Recent product updates provide more options during sequence import and improve the primer and alignment tools.

Registry and Inventory

Registry and Inventory are core to modeling data on Benchling and managing critical in-lab samples. In addition to Worklists updates, we also had the beta release of a brand new entity type - ‘Mixtures’, which addresses newer R&D use cases.

Insights

We launched Benchling Insights earlier this year, enabling users to leverage their data and run analytics seamlessly within the platform. This opens up access to comprehensive operational and scientific insights. We have added several new features to the Insights application to make this data analysis easier than ever.

Lab Automation

Benchling for Lab Automation unlocks the potential of your laboratory hardware by integrating Benchling with liquid handlers and analytical instruments. We recently released updates which expand functionality of the Lab Automation product, improve usability, and support a wider range of use cases.

App Platform and Schemas

Benchling’s application platform and schemas are designed to help organizations manage their research effortlessly. We released several updates that significantly improve search functionality and make it easier to navigate schemas.

Developer Platform

Our developer platform is fundamental to centralizing and standardizing all your R&D data. Benchling’s APIs are built to match the flexibility and speed of modern life science R&D. Keeping with this philosophy we released several API updates that removes the need for manual actions across a wide range of R&D activities when using Molecular Biology, Registry, and Search.

For a more comprehensive list of all the features released refer to our product release announcement section at help.benchling.com.

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