Manual record keeping in cell culture laboratories is prone to error and expensive to maintain. The extensive use of cell culture to provide models for biochemical and molecular biological research serves to magnify these errors at great expense. Development of Cell Culture Laboratory Management Software (CCLMS) is proposed to relieve cell culture technicians of the manual record keeping problems inherent in full time cell culture laboratories. This Phase I proposal provides for development and deployment of a prototype CCLMS for a single-laboratory solution. The prototype will be implemented with the general purpose FileMaker Pro relational database application. The CCLMS features will include, but are not limited to: (1) a configurable frozen storage database, (2) complete tracking of each cell line's history, (3) interactive list of growing cells, (4) one-click splits, (5) error-free cell count entry and calculation, and (6) automatic printing of daily work on water-proof labels. Once installed, they hypothesize that CCLMS will improve efficiency, reduce training time, and reduce error to become an essential cost cutting tool for any cell culture laboratory. If CCLMS performance yields meet or exceed expectations, a dedicated, compiled version of CCLMS will be created for Macintosh and Windows personal computers by a Phase II proposal.
