MyLabStocks: a web-application to manage molecular biology materials

Laboratory stocks are the hardware of research. They must be stored and managed with mimimum loss of material and information. Plasmids, oligonucleotides and strains are regularly exchanged between collaborators within and between laboratories. Managing and sharing information about every item is crucial for retrieval of reagents, for planning experiments and for reproducing past experimental results. We have developed a web-based application to manage stocks commonly used in a molecular biology laboratory. Its functionalities include user-defined privileges, visualization of plasmid maps directly from their sequence and the capacity to search items from fields of annotation or directly from a query sequence using BLAST. It is designed to handle records of plasmids, oligonucleotides, yeast strains, antibodies, pipettes and notebooks. Based on PHP/MySQL, it can easily be extended to handle other types of stocks and it can be installed on any server architecture. MyLabStocks is freely available from: https://forge.cbp.ens-lyon.fr/redmine/projects/mylabstocks under an open source licence.