Laboratory Information Systems to High-Throughput Screening

Abstract

High-throughput screening is a very complex process of large-scale testing of thousands, potentially millions of chemical compounds for their biological activity in a single experiment. Because of its large scale nature there is a great need for some LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System), that would keep track of your chemical samples and screening results. The cornerstone of the whole system should be a database of chemical structures, potentially enriched by their physical and chemical properties linked with actual chemical samples under study and their physical location in a storage system. Having this information, one should be able to create a screening experiment and assign measured values to one's samples in specified concentrations. With all these data combined, one can process, visualize and analyze the results and either to confirm that no mistakes have been made or to backtrack the error if some problems have arisen. ChemGenDB is such a LIMS. It is being developed at Institute of Molecular Genetics and it should cover all demands mentioned above and much more.