BonzaiLIMS

The Problem

Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) are an increasingly important part of modern laboratory infrastructure. As typically very sophisticated software products, LIMS often require considerable resources to select, deploy and maintain. Larger organisations may have access to specialist IT support to assist with requirements elicitation and software customisation, however smaller groups will often have limited IT support to perform the kind of iterative development that can resolve the difficulties that biologists often have when specifying requirements. Translational medicine aims to accelerate the process of treatment discovery by bringing together multiple disciplines to discover new approaches to treating disease, or novel applications of existing treatments. The diverse set of disciplines and complexity of processing procedures involved, especially with the use of high throughput technologies, bring difficulties in customizing a generic LIMS to provide a single system for managing sample related data within a translational medicine research setting, especially where limited IT support is available.

The Solution

Bonzai LIMS has been designed and developed as a lightweight Laboratory Information Managment System .

It utilises very simple data model that can be easily implemented using a variety of technologies, and can be easily extended as specific requirements dictate.

A reference implementation using Oracle 11g , Python and Django is available for download