What is the crowd's opinion of Benchling?

From 3.5 billion comments

Yeah, I would not bring a lab notebook home with me, especially if I did microbiology. (Biosafety training told us about this horrible case at Yale where a professor carried home some virulent strain of salmonella on his necktie, cooked dinner, and killed his whole family.)

Maybe make scans for home use? Or use an online lab notebook service like Benchling?

I'm all for the electronic lab notebook. Personally, I highly recommend Benchling - it's great for organizing projects including data, protocols, and lab notebook. I was never great about remembering to update my physical lab notebook, but when I can quickly type everything up and drag pictures from the computer in, it's so much easier and I stay much more up to date.

I don't think I would use it and it sounds like a lot of work to build. Your main issue is that you lose protocols? We have a Google Drive folder where we keep ours. You're terrible at keeping a lab notebook? I think it would be even more inconvenient to use an app.

Besides platforms exist that have been built out with more functionality. See: Benchling

Check out benchling! It integrates a lot of features from these products like primer design/annotation, but also allows you to manage/share your DNA sequence data more easily.

Just stumbled on this:

>Increased efficiency of HDR-based knock-ins from repeated cutting after indel formation > >Cpf1 cleaves target DNA far away from the PAM at the end of the protospacer, unlike Cas9. The indels Cpf1 causes will therefore be located far from the target site. Cpf1 can continue cutting at the target site as a result, which may increase the chance that new DNA can be inserted at that site.

https://benchling.com/pub/cpf1

Apparently, the Cpf1 PAM sequence is TTTN on the 5' side. That sucks for my needs, but maybe you can do something with it.

Assuming you're in academia, the plasmid management, annotation and construction features are free. They don't nag, but, yes, they sell some unrelated features (protocols/gel management). FWIW, I don't have any financial ties to this company; I just like it.

https://benchling.com/pricing

This definitely is more applicable for an experimentation heavy PhD but I absolutely LOVE Benchling: https://benchling.com

It has a lot of inbuilt features/display options and has really helped with my notetaking when I get lazy about handwriting notes.

Otherwise, I definitely rely heavily on google drive for autobacking up basically everything in my "lab" folder.

I would say chronological order within individual projects has worked the best for me - if you get in the habit of international date formatting all your experiments/analyses/notes it really speeds up searching for information even years later.

If you're primarily coding - github or gitlab can be lifesavers. Intimidating to start, but it becomes pretty intuitive eventually.

And I'll echo support for Zotero - the Word plugin is dope.

I'd take a look at Benchling or maybe OpenWetWare. These might be solutions that work just as well or better for your particular problem.

If you're looking for digital tools, take a look at this list that I made a little while ago. I've found some of them to be quite handy.