Jeffrey Perkel has been a scientific writer and editor since 2000. He holds a PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Pennsylvania, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard Medical School.
As in so many facets of society, smartphones and tablets are transforming the research laboratory. Looking for a research paper on PubMed? It’s as easy as checking in on Facebook—just load the proper app and go, whether you’re sitting at the bench or in a bar (though why you’d be checking references in a bar is another story). Diligent core-facility managers can check on their equipment before going to sleep, and post-docs can research protocols and order reagents while waiting for the train.
Indeed, there’s a broad portfolio of scientific apps available for both iOS and Android devices, covering everything from education and experiment planning to laboratory timers and calculators. Yet adoption has been slow, says Lenny Teytelman, cofounder of ZappyLab, an app developer in Berkeley, Calif. “It’s a very underserved market.”
In a blog post entitled “Was Henry Ford an Idiot? (Will Scientists Use Mobile in the Lab?),” Teytelman addresses some common complaints, including fear of contaminating a personal device, lack of interest in mobile apps among scientists and incompatibility with gloves. His bottom line: These issues are all red herrings. Scientific apps have failed to take off not because there’s no interest, but because the apps themselves haven’t been compelling. (And of course, for those who worry about contaminating (or losing) their personal mobile devices, “You can get an Android phone for $50,” Teytelman notes.)
“You have to make sure the app is of very high quality, and build awareness,” he explains. “People thought you could make a [mediocre] app and people would flock to it, and that’s wrong. You have to make something that’s really good.”
What follows are a handful of useful apps for today’s biology lab. This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but we do hope it will spur discussion. If you have a favorite mobile app for the lab, tell us in the comments below.
1. Bench Tools mobile suite
Available for iOS and Android, ZappyLab’s free Bench Tools mobile suite includes four utility apps—a lab timer, counter, molarity calculator and growth-curve generator—as well as a crowd-sourced protocols repository (Protocols) and a literature curation and recommendation tool called PubChase. According to Teytelman, Protocols is the key piece of the puzzle. “The real goal of ZappyLab is to create a Wikipedia for scientific methods,” he explains, “and for that we need to give people an easy way to create and share protocols.” Ultimately, he hopes to tie the app in with vendor hooks so users can, for instance, purchase reagents from within the app.
2. Evernote
This popular cloud-based note-taking app provides a great way to store papers, doodles, audio and more. Available on Mac and Windows desktops and on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry devices, Evernote isn’t designed specifically for scientists but rather has broad appeal—it’s essentially a free, unstructured, searchable database capable of storing just about anything you can dream up. Some, for instance, use Evernote to store searchable images of recipes and wine labels. “My favorite app is the phone for taking pictures of notes on my whiteboard after meeting with students and post-docs,” says John Rinn, associate professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard Medical School—notes that Rinn plugs into Evernote for recall later.
3. Fluorescence SpectraViewer
Life Technologies’ Fluorescence SpectraViewer gives iOS users the 4-1-1 on fluorescent proteins and dyes. A mobile version of the company’s online SpectraViewer tool, Fluorescence SpectraViewer enables researchers to “[p]lot and compare spectra, check the spectral compatibility for many fluorophores and email the configuration to yourself or others in the lab in a clear printable format,” according to the app’s iTunes entry.
4. JuiceSSH
JuiceSSH is a free “secure shell” client for Android devices. Using SSH, researchers can effectively open a remote terminal window from their phone or tablet, enabling them to check system status, launch and halt jobs and do anything else they can do from a shell window. Russell Neches, a Ph.D. candidate in Jonathan Eisen’s lab at the University of California, Davis, says JuiceSSH is by “far the best SSH client for Android, or perhaps any mobile device. I use it extensively for monitoring large computational tasks, such as genome assemblies and OTU [operational taxonomic unit] clustering, and for doing the occasional bit of urgent system administration for the laboratory.”
5. LabAlert
Researchers who need to routinely monitor environmental-control hardware, such as freezers, refrigerators and incubators, might want to consider Panasonic’s LabAlert system. LabAlert is an environmental-monitoring system, says Carl Radosevich, product specialist at Panasonic Healthcare Corporation of North America. The system comprises physical probes (e.g., for temperature, humidity or carbon dioxide) that are placed in the hardware to be monitored. These are connected to a transmitter, which in turn communicates with a router-like “gateway.” By communicating with that gateway, either via a web browser or the LabAlert iOS app, users can ensure that their equipment is functioning normally, set permissions and access, assign maintenance tasks and more. According to Radosevich, LabAlert is used in both academia and industry but has become especially popular in vaccine and blood-storage monitoring. “We are really taking off in retail pharmacy,” he says.
6. MetaMobile
Where LabAlert allows users to monitor their hardware, Molecular Devices’ MetaMobile software lets users control it. Molecular Devices’ MetaMorph package provides a software interface for researchers to control and automate their microscopes, and using MetaMobile, they can extend that control to their iPads and iPhones. According to Bruce Gonzaga, MetaMorph product manager at Molecular Devices, the app is designed to facilitate multitasking by enabling users to keep track of their experiments without having to sit in front of the microscope. Users can view images in real time, instruct the camera shutter when to fire, set up and stop experiments and more. In particular, Gonzaga says, MetaMobile should be valuable to core managers, who can use it to track and troubleshoot multiple instruments remotely. The MetaMobile app is free, but it requires a MetaMorph plug-in that costs $500. (Another microscope-control option is Leica Microsystems’ Leica Mobile Connection app.)
7. Molecules
If you’ve ever sat at the bench and wanted to take a quick peek at the structure of your protein of interest, Molecules is for you. The app displays three-dimensional structures from PubChem and the Protein Data Bank, which users can rotate and manipulate using standard gestures such as pinch-to-zoom.
8. PCalc
No researcher should be without a scientific calculator, and TLA Systems’ PCalc is one of the best. Available for $9.99 on iTunes, the app is “overflowing with features, including scientific operations, conversions, constants, and even user-defined functions. And you get it all in an interface that can look as simple or complete, and as modern or retro, as you prefer,” according to MacWorld’s review. Android users should check out RealCalc Scientific Calculator.
9. PubMed On Tap
If you ever need to access PubMed from your iOS-based mobile device, check out PubMed On Tap. With PubMed On Tap, you can search PubMed and retrieve PDFs directly from your phone or tablet. In addition, you “can search your personal reference library, organize your references in groups (static and smart), and email references from your device to yourself or others in a form suitable for reading or importing into desktop reference management applications,” according to the tool’s iTunes page. Android users can try PubMed Mobile. And there are other tools for managing your reference libraries, as well, including PaperShip and Papers 3.
10. Odds and ends
Finally, devotees of particular life science tools vendors can check out their brand-of-choice’s custom apps.
New England Biolabs’ NEB Tools, for instance, offers such tools as “Enzyme Finder,” “Double Digest” and “Tm Calculator." Sigma Aldrich has developed multiple apps, including a molarity calculator, while AB SCIEX’s MS iCalc provides a series of mass spectrometry-related calculators, including functions to compute m/z from chemical formula, view molecular isotope patterns, match m/z to elemental formulae and more. Promega has even leveraged the phone's camera to build an iOS-based colony counter.
Educational apps are available, too. Life Technologies, for instance, has compiled protocols and resources into apps for real-time PCR, digital PCR, and flow cytometry, as has Bio-Rad Laboratories with its Universal qPCR iPad app.
Do you have a favorite laboratory app? Tell us in the comments!
Image: JuiceSSH