%0 Journal Article
%T A Perl toolkit for LIMS development
%A James A Morris
%A Simon A Gayther
%A Ian J Jacobs
%A Christopher Jones
%J Source Code for Biology and Medicine
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1751-0473-3-4
%X We have developed ArrayPipeline, a Perl toolkit providing object oriented methods that facilitate the rapid development of bespoke LIMS applications. The toolkit includes Perl objects that encapsulate key components of a LIMS, providing methods for creating interactive web pages, interacting with databases, error tracking and reporting, and user and session management. The MT_Plate object provides methods for manipulation and management of microtitre plates, while a given LIMS can be encapsulated by extension of the core modules, providing system specific methods for database interaction and web page management.This important addition to the Perl developer's library will make the development of in house LIMS applications quicker and easier encouraging laboratories to create bespoke LIMS applications to meet their specific data management requirements.High throughput investigation techniques such as microarrays are now well established in scientific research. As the costs of these techniques fall, greater numbers of laboratories are adopting these approaches. High throughput techniques and the equipment associated with them provide researchers with a number of new challenges, one of which is the management and storage of the vast quantities of data they generate. Laboratory notebooks and computer spreadsheets still form the data management strategy for many research scientists, and this simple approach has advantages in the ease of storage and viewing of the data for low throughput approaches however this approach is inadequate for the amounts of data generated using the latest laboratory techniques.The solution to this data management challenge is the implementation of a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), a computer application designed to track samples, store data generated by laboratory equipment and experiments and report these data. There are numerous commercial LIMS applications available however these can be very costly and sometimes overly compl
%U http://www.scfbm.org/content/3/1/4