Seemingly, there is a mobile device application available for just about anything we wish to do in our daily lives, from finding street parking to learning a language. Convenience, user-friendliness and practicality are the main draws of mobile apps, and more and more, biotechnology companies are seeking to bring these qualities into the lab by developing their own apps. Likewise, a growing number of scientists are now using either tablet- or smartphone-based applications in the laboratory, with about 70% of participants in a recent Biocompare survey responding positively when asked if they use their devices at the bench. Here’s a breakdown of how the laboratory-app sector looks toward the end of 2016, and where it may go in the near future.
Calculating success
Biocompare’s survey results reveal that conversion calculators remain the most popular laboratory mobile apps, with just over 50% of the respondents reporting they had installed such apps “to better perform [their] research.” Apps like these—for example, Chemistry Lab Suite by Google Play—make quick work of tasks like stock-solution calculations and even offer the ability to perform more complex computations, such as predicting the size of peptide fragments in mass spectrometry from their starting amino acid sequences. Another app making light work of experimental setup is Agilent Technologies’ LC Calculator. This app can simulate different liquid chromatography conditions using its back-pressure and flow-rate calculators, enabling the user to explore different ‘what if’ scenarios, such as which column configurations work within their system's pressure range.
There definitely is an emerging trend toward more and more predictive capability in the mobile-app domain.
One of the most state-of-the-art offerings in this space is an iPad app called AsterisTM, developed by Optibrium to aid in the design of de novo, pharmaceutically active molecules. More than just a chemistry drawing tool, Asteris enables the evaluation of new drug compound ideas, on the go. It features Optibrium’s proprietary Glowing MoleculeTM visualization technology, which lights different parts of the in-design molecule red or blue, depending on whether the user’s molecule adjustments increase or decrease its properties, respectively. Targeting the pharmaceutical industry, Asteris supports Optibrium’s StarDrop™ desktop app and exemplifies the increasing number of mobile apps geared toward drug development. “It’s early days for mobile apps in the pharma sphere at the moment,” says Optibrium CEO Matt Segall, “but the trend is likely to accelerate in the foreseeable future.”
A reference library in your pocket
Another top-ranked use of mobile apps was for the location of literature citations, with just over 40% of the survey respondents citing this functionality. There are several mobile apps for this purpose, such as Cell Alerts from Elsevier, Science Mobile from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and NEJM This Week from The New England Journal of Medicine, which allow researchers to keep up to date with all the latest publications via subscriptions and push notifications. However, none of these apps serves as a fully comprehensive mobile citation library, a need that the recently launched F1000Workspace mobile app aims to address.
The F1000Workspace app is following where its desktop counterpart has led; the latter is already revolutionizing the way researchers manage and use references with its cloud-based citation storage, “save-for-later” browser extension, Word plug-in and collaboration-enabling features. It also evolves with each user interaction, analyzing citation preferences via machine learning and suggesting new papers for the user to read. Not all of these functions are currently featured in the mobile app, but the article-suggestion feature will be added in the early part of 2017, shares João Peres, product manager for F1000Workspace. “We wanted a tool that researchers could use every day, not only for managing references, but for discovering, too,” adds Peres. “We also realized a lot of researchers are accessing papers on the move: on their commute, in the lab, in the meeting room.” The purpose of the mobile application is to increase this access, Peres explains.
The manual is dead, long live the app!
Another advantage of mobile apps is that they instantly shrink the paper trail that usually comes with laboratory work down to nothing.
There is a wealth of tablet and smartphone applications that offer access to protocols, troubleshooting guides or instrument manuals in just a few taps of a screen, meaning you can carry a whole library of reference material in your lab-coat pocket.
With Biocompare survey respondents quoting product technical guides (37%), product support (29%) or protocol sharing (27%) as their main reasons for using mobile apps, it’s not hard to see why there’s been a steady growth in these types of applications. The 2015 installment of this article covered several such mobile apps; one of the most recent offerings in this domain is the myFRAG companion app for the Fragment AnalyzerTM, an automated capillary electrophoresis device developed by Advanced Analytical Technologies Inc. (AATI) to analyze nucleic acid fragments for their quantity and quality. Applications include assessing NGS libraries, screening for gene-editing events and separating genomic DNA, up to 40,000 base pairs. “We created myFRAG following the initial idea to develop a very functional app for the Fragment Analyzer system,” explains Steve Siembieda, AATI's vice president of commercialization. The idea, he continues, was to replace the half-dozen manuals associated with the Fragment Analyzer and offer these in one location on the myFRAG app. The mobile app is also regularly updated with useful tips on how to use the Fragment Analyzer instrument. These tips are written by the technical team at AATI and sent to the app, along with a push notification to alert the user of their arrival. Future plans for the app include the launch of a companion website app, so Fragment Analyzer users will be able to use the app across platforms—and incorporating connectivity with the instrument itself, “so that users can be instantly notified when their analysis is complete,” Siembieda adds.
In addition to the obvious reduction in paper resources, users of the app save on the economic and environmental costs of shipping physical resources cross-country and internationally.
“We used to send a hard copy of our 25-page manuals out with every Fragment Analyzer kit purchased,” says Siembieda. “That adds up, if you think about it. Now we don’t send any physical manuals out at all, reducing the carbon footprint of shipping our kits.”
Make your own app
There is a broad collection of apps available that cater to genomics research, but perhaps a sign of things to come in this area is heralded by a service that lets you design your own genome study in an app.
This service is the brainchild of 23andMe, the first and only company offering genetic testing services directly to the individual that meet FDA standards. As a dedicated webpage explains, with the RESTful API, third-party developers “can leverage 23andMe’s platform to create novel, complementary genetic applications or to integrate genetics into their pre-existing applications.” Essentially, researchers can design their own genotyping-phenotyping studies to capture information from participants’ smartphones and then pair this with their genetics data obtained from 23andMe test kits. At the moment, the 23andMe app-design process requires input from those familiar with app development, but the iOS Xcode module is available to any lab with adequate ethical approval and which passes 23andMe’s review process. This will enable smaller research projects to gather a lot more data than they could without this support. “Most of us are spending a lot of our time on smartphones, using all kinds of apps for all kinds of things—we wanted to let genomics researchers tap into that,” says Ruby Gadelrab, vice president of commercial marketing at 23andMe, who led the development of the app platform. A lab based at Stanford University has already begun to implement its own app using 23andMe’s service. Perhaps next year, a user-designed 23andMe-powered app will feature in the next installment of this app review?
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