Reviewed by Emmanouil Skoufos

(Posted July 25, 1997 ? Issue 13; archived August 15, 1997)

Test Platform:
Pentium Pro 200 MHz processor running Windows 95 with 128 Mb RAM

Overview

Bio/Chem LabAssistant from Interactive Learning Europe is software designed to streamline biological or chemical laboratory work by integrating 50 diverse, commonly used tools into a single package with a very user-friendly interface. The tools are bundled in the following categories: biological, chemical, physical, statistics, and plotting and lab utilities. The package can be used in various settings and capacities. As a research companion in a molecular biology/biochemistry laboratory, Bio/Chem LabAssistant can be used to prepare chemical solutions, examine reaction conditions in PCR experiments, or quickly chart data. The program can help plan experiments such as PCR amplifications, and analyze experimental results from sequence analysis and enzyme kinetics experiments. And as a teaching aid in undergraduate laboratory and lecture courses, it helps students both design virtual experiments/demonstrations before their work on the bench, and create accurate and complete laboratory reports. In addition, Bio/Chem LabAssistant's online help and documentation are excellent and easily accessible. Although most of its utilities can be found elsewhere, their convenient integration in a single package for a reasonable price (#29.50 for a single educational user) and its user-friendly interface make it a very attractive solution for many different uses.

Program Features

All features are accessible through menus. A customizable toolbar helps organize features by quickly accessible groups, convenient for users' specific purposes and the nature of their experiments. The help section is excellent and is available from within each utility. There are help examples for each utility, making it easy for the new user to learn all the varied applications of Bio/Chem LabAssistant.

Biological Applications

These include acetylene reduction calculation, cell culture dilution calculation, chlorophyll calculation, DNA concentrations, estimation of enzyme activity, exponential growth curves, use of an internal standard, oxygen electrode calculation, PCR primer data, and PCR primer design from amino acid sequences, as well as conversion of nucleotide sequences to amino acid sequences and vice versa (see figure 1). The sequence conversion and primer design application suite is very powerful and has all the tools, such as determining PCR reaction conditions, that make the transition from planning to experiment very easy. Some of the calculators such as culture dilution, DNA concentration for absorbance, exponential growth, and enzyme affinity are useful in most laboratories, whereas others, such as acetylene reduction and chlorophyll, are targeted toward more specialized study.

Chemical Applications

These include amino acid data, conversion of chemical formulas to mass and vice versa, molecular mass calculation, a periodic table, buffer choice, radioisotope decay, a solution wizard, stable isotope determination, and dilution calculation. The solution wizard (see figure 2) and the dilution calculator are extremely useful in speeding the most trivial parts of daily laboratory work. Also handy are the reference tables for buffers and amino acid data, as well as the mass-formula calculator.

Physical Applications

These include area and volume geometry, Boyle's law calculation, centrifugation calculation, diffusion rate estimation, a gas concentration wizard, light absorption, oxygen solubility in water, saturation vapor pressure determination, rate of dilution determination, and rate of tubing flow. By far, a favorite utility is the centrifugation calculator. It uses the rotor radius to convert centrifugation g values, which are indicated in most experimental protocols, to RPM, which is what one actually sets on the centrifuge.

Statistics and Plotting

These include confidence limits and t-tests, Latin square design, normal distribution, probabilities of t, c2 and F statistics, random numbers, random permutations, a statistics calculator and graphs, XY plots, and curve fitting. Even though the statistics package is very simple when compared to specialized programs, and will not meet the needs of sophisticated users, it is very functional for day-to-day laboratory work when simple statistical analysis of results are required. The graphics utilities have a spreadsheet interface and allow for statistical analysis of the data. One disadvantage of Bio/Chem LabAssistant is that the output of a graph (unlike the data) cannot be copied to the Windows clipboard, a feature that many expect to find in any Windows software program.

Laboratory Utilities

These include a calculator, an image analyzer (a utility for measuring distances in scanned image files), a lab timer, a gas mixture calculator, tables of physical constants, and metric units and prefixes, as well as a unit conversion calculator. The unit conversion calculator (see figure 3) conveniently includes conversions of length, area, volume, mass, time, biomolecule concentration, pressure, radiation, temperature, and velocity. The concentration and radiation conversions are the ones of most importance and use in a biology laboratory.

In addition to these utilities, there is a direct shortcut from within the programto Microsoft Notepad, allowing for quick transfer of the utilities' output into an integrated form. The presence of a more powerful text editor (or a shortcut to Microsoft Word), in conjunction with allowing cutting and pasting graphical output, may make this program a viable alternative to several of the available scientific notebook programs, since it integrates more tools. Furthermore, the fact that there is at least one editable example for each utility makes Bio/Chem LabAssistant a potential didactic tool in a variety of undergraduate science lecture and laboratory courses.

The Bottom Line

System Requirements

Bio/Chem LabAssistant's minimum system requirements are Windows 3.1 or Windows 95, at least 8 Mb of RAM, and 2.5 Mb of hard disk space.

Purchasing Information

Bio/Chem LabAssistant is available from Interactive Learning Europe, 124 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge CB4 4ZS, United Kingdom. ILE can be reached by telephone at +44(0)1223 425558, ext. 787, and by fax at +44(0)1223 425349. Prices range from #29.50 (for single, educational user) to #500 pounds (100 educational users license pack). Bio/Chem LabAssistant can be ordered online through ILE's Web site. A functional demo is also available online. In the demo version, most of the applications run only from examples and not allow the input of external data from the user. Nevertheless, one can get a taste of the utility of Bio/Chem LabAssistant.

Emmanouil Skoufos is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Medical Informatics at Yale University School of Medicine.