A novel laboratory version management system for tracking complex biological experiments

Abstract

Ability to keep track of records for various biological experiments allows for future validation of the current experiments and other non-experimental laboratory procedures. With the increasing popularity of publishing biological data in XML format, there arises the need for the control and management of this data, as well as dynamically exporting this data to various formats for reporting purposes. As such data is constantly changing, users want to be able to query previous versions, plotting data across different versions from history, query changes in documents, as well as to retrieve a particular document version efficiently. This paper proposes an XML-based version management system for tracking and analyzing data obtained from any laboratory experiments in an effective and meaningful manner. This includes experiments ranging from genomic, proteomic and protein structural. We also present methods for importing non XML data into the system as well as generating reports in multiple formats dynamically.