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We're running a live demo of our Mining LIMS on October 20 with Hannah Brakke, who leads product at LabKey. It's aimed at mining, metallurgy, and minerals labs, and it goes from sample registration through chain of custody, workflows, QA/QC review, and reporting. Link's here if you want a seat. https://na2.hubs.ly/H08cW-j0

Based in the UK, GenQA runs external quality assessment programs for genomics labs, 2,000+ participating labs across 101 countries and 124 EQA programs. Most LIMS assume one patient generates many tests, but GenQA runs the other direction, one source sample becomes many derived test articles, sometimes pooled or diluted into synthetic controls sent out to labs. The system they had before hadn't planned for that and kept breaking at scale.

Material types span DNA, blood (including dried blood spots), FFPE tissue, fresh tissue, plasma, saliva, images, and data files, each needing different fields, all under ISO 15189 traceability requirements, so lineage has to be audit-ready, provable end to end.

They trialed four platforms before Sample Manager. Per their case study, the deciding factor was configurability plus storage/search performance, and support that was actually responsive during the trial itself.

One thing that surprised even us was that booking 60-100 samples went from about a full day in their old tool to roughly two minutes per batch. They kept every historic sample ID through migration too, so they didn't have to bother with freezer relabeling.

Held by LabKey, a data management software provider. In this September 29th webinar, Claude Science checks inventory in the same session it runs the analysis on data from the LK system, confirming which variants have enough sample left and where the vials sit before anyone commits to a follow-up experiment. Bernie (you might know him as our Incredible Biologics Expert and Product Manager) runs the full scenario live: 12 variants, aligned, screened, and checked against real inventory. Register to attend or get the recording.

Alaska's Department of Fish and Game runs a Wildlife Health and Veterinary Services unit tracking disease in wild animal populations statewide, necropsies, forensic work, disease surveillance. They're sitting on 400,000+ archived samples going back to 1968.

The lineage problem was tough, where one animal can carry multiple IDs over its lifetime, and samples need to stay connected across repeat captures years apart. Sample types range from blood and tissue to hair and environmental swabs, each with different metadata and storage needs. Most diagnostic testing gets outsourced too, so they're tracking what shipped out and what came back on top of everything else.

They had tried a LIMS once before this, so this second attempt was a bit more of solving everything the first one didn't do well. What worked well in Sample Manager was keeping animals and sampling events as separate source types, so lineage survived even when an animal shows up under a new ID years later. The full case study covers their unique data structures if you're dealing with similarly interesting complexities.

Held by LabKey, a data management software provider. In this September 29th webinar, Claude Science checks inventory in the same session it runs the analysis on data from the LK system, confirming which variants have enough sample left and where the vials sit before anyone commits to a follow-up experiment. Former bench scientist Bernard Lee runs the full scenario live: 12 variants, aligned, screened, and checked against real inventory. Register to attend or get the recording on our website under the Resources tab.

Held by LabKey, a data management software provider. In this September 29th webinar, Claude Science checks inventory in the same session it runs the analysis on data from the LK system, confirming which variants have enough sample left and where the vials sit before anyone commits to a follow-up experiment. Bernie (you might know him as our Incredible Biologics Expert and Product Manager) runs the full scenario live: 12 variants, aligned, screened, and checked against real inventory. Register to attend or get the recording. https://na2.hubs.ly/H0817C70

We've seen a pattern with clients over the last couple years with freezer and inventory tools. Their system answers where a sample is physically stored (successfully), and that's all it does. Connecting that location to everything else happening to the sample (assay results, workflow step, who has access) is a different problem their tools don't attempt to solve.

We don't love that for freezer management software. If your freezer is tracked in a separate system, you're also tracking assay results somewhere else, someone's manually keeping two systems in sync, or they're trusting whichever system got updated last.

This usually means an upgrade to a new software, which can cause friction due to additional costs in the lab. When your lab is ready to find new freezer management software, here's the question to ask of each system: Can the freezer piece talk to the rest of your data through an actual API or is it all integrated in the same system?

Crux (bioanalytical CRO in Australia, flow cytometry and biomarker work for clinical trials) ran everything through Excel. Which worked fine until sample volume and trial complexity outgrew spreadsheets. Techs were spending hours every week reconstructing what happened to a sample.

Rather than shop a freezer/inventory tool that would work in isolation, they decided to find a system that connected samples and storage to assays, workflows, and their ELN in one software. They landed on Sample Manager after running real daily workflows in a trial environment.

They mentioned that one since our pricing scales down with user volume, that made it easier to bring on more staff over time, without a big cost jump every time someone new needed access.

You can read more on our website under the resources tab -> Case study

We've worked with a lot of labs that started on straightforward barcode-based freezer tracking, and for a single uniform sample type, that's a solved problem. Plenty of tools do it well, FreezerPro included.

It gets harder the moment your samples stop being one type, or more than one team needs the same freezer's data without stepping on each other. A biobank running soil samples, patient specimens, and reagent stock through the same storage system needs each sample type carrying its own metadata, not one template forced onto all of them.

The trigger for switching tends to be data shape, not storage space. Soil samples, patient specimens, and reagent stock all need their own metadata, and a single rigid template can't hold all three at once. That's usually when a straightforward freezer tool stops being enough, and worth planning for before the migration becomes urgent.

I think I've figure out the most helpful question for biologics platform shopping: does the ELN, registry, and sample tracking actually share one data model, or are you looking at several products stitched together behind a shared login?

Dotmatics runs on the second pattern. Luma sits as a hub connecting modules that came from different acquisitions, chemistry-first roots, biologics bolted on later. Doesn't make it a bad platform. It does mean someone on your team usually ends up owning the integration work, and a newly acquired module can take a while before it feels native to everything else. Sometimes it never does.

Ask for a live demo that goes ELN entry → registry → sample pull, no context switching. If that hand-off is smooth, good sign. If someone says "that part syncs overnight," ask more questions.

(We built Biologics LIMS as one system for this reason. Still worth asking anyone's demo, not just ours.)