Getting Your Lab Organized on Cytobank

January 21, 2012 at 12:04 pm Angela Landrigan Leave a comment

With a new year ahead of us, you might be thinking it’s time for a fresh start. Maybe it’s time to organize the experiments that resulted from a flurry of work at the end of last year, or maybe you manage a lab and would like to keep past and ongoing experiments organized as people join and leave the lab. In this post, we’ll share our thoughts on how Cytobank can help you achieve these goals.

Hosted models of Cytobank

You may be familiar with our main server at http://www.cytobank.org/cytobank/, but did you know that we can host an instance of Cytobank specifically for your lab group? With these hosted solutions, your lab manager or PI controls who has access to your server and can guide the group in configuring projects to keep various research branches well organized. Read our previous post on Projects to learn more about Projects. Hosted models of Cytobank also have the advantage of offering you premium functionality that isn’t available on our main server, such as SPADE and dose response.

Giving your lab manager or PI access by default

When you upload an experiment, you have the option to set the principle investigator (PI) on the experiment, which gives the PI full access to that experiment. In your particular lab, you may want to give more than one person access to every experiment you upload (perhaps your PI and lab manager). To do this, simply create a Project, give your lab manager and PI access to that Project, and then set it to be your “Default Project” under the Profile link at the top of the Cytobank webpage. Now, every experiment you upload will become part of that project, and your PI and lab manager will automatically have access. Giving your PI and lab manager access to your experiments is a great way to promote continuity and data-preservation in your lab.

Backup and keep all your data organized: protocols, presentations, microscopy, and more

Uploading your data to Cytobank, whether for storage, analysis, or sharing, is a great way to create a reliable backup for your data. In addition to backing up your flow cytometry experiments, our servers allow you to backup data of any type, and to associate those data with specific experiments. To backup and associate a protocol, presentation, microscopy image, or any other file type with one of your flow cytometry experiments, simply visit the Experiment Details page for that experiment and use the Attachments or Protocols section to upload additional filetypes. You can also upload experiments consisting of only non-FCS files by creating a new experiment and choosing to upload only those files.

Use our Inbox tools to efficiently manage and rapidly access your experiments

Now that you’ve organized your experiments into projects, attached related non-FCS files, and given your PI access to your data, have a look at some tools we offer to further organize and filter your experiments using the Cytobank Inbox. Read our previous blog post on Organizing Your Experiment Inbox.

Invite a colleague

Are you working on a collaboration, or alongside someone in your lab? Are your PI and lab manager looking to preserve data as people join and leave the lab? Make sure they have signed up for a Cytobank account so that you can easily share your data with them. You can use the “Invite” link at the top of the Cytobank webpage to invite colleagues to join. Now you’ll never have to email FCS files again, and instead can share well-labeled experiments and figures with the click of a button.

- Angela

Entry filed under: Cytobank. Tags: backup data, Cytobank, dose response, experiments, flow cytometry, hosted, Inbox tools, lab group, microscopy, new year, organize, presentations, protocols.

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