The Benchling Bioregistry: Intelligently manage strains, antibodies, and more

Roger Pellegrini

Tens of thousands of scientists use Benchling for editing sequences and note-taking, but scientists use a lot more than DNA and proteins in the lab. Today, we're excited to announce a groundbreaking tool for tracking any biological entity: the Benchling Bioregistry. The video below and our initial import tools focus on strain management as a use case, but the bioregistry can be used to track plasmids, oligos, antibodies, and more.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULHU63p8vbs&w=560&h=315]

Try out the Bioregistry

Track Any Biological Entity

Thanks to our co-development partnerships with select Enterprise customers and Academic labs, we designed the Bioregistry to address actual difficulties that scientists face on a day-to-day basis. We created a new “Custom Inventory” file type on Benchling that lets scientists define and track any biological entity in the Bioregistry beyond the plasmids and oligos Benchling already supports, including strains and antibodies. Define a “Schema” for each biological entity you want to store in the Bioregistry to set the fields you want to store about it.

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Import, Centralize, and Standardize Existing Data

The Bioregistry helps a team move from disparate spreadsheets to one, standardized database. The transition process is smooth—import your existing spreadsheets into the Bioregistry, and Benchling will automatically map them to the Schemas you've defined. Each time you register a new strain, a unique, numbered ID is automatically assigned.

Our co-development partnerships also exposed us to the difficulties of using spreadsheets to manage the complex relationships between biological entities. With Benchling's Bioregistry, you can easily create links such as parent strains and component plasmids to trace lineage information. Just search for the file name and a link to it automatically fills in.

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Integrate the Bioregistry with Notebook Entries

On its own, the Bioregistry is the biological database that scientists have been waiting for. Together with Benchling's other tools, it's a huge leap towards our vision of unified, frictionless research. Within Benchling's Lab Notebook, you can easily reference and link to any Bioregistry entity, by just typing “@” and searching. From any Bioregistry entity, you can view every experiment where that entity was used.

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Stay tuned for upcoming integrations between the Bioregistry and the Molecular Biology Suite, which will make it even easier to create strains and antibodies from the plasmids, proteins, and oligos you design on Benchling.

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