Release Notes: Volume 9, 2023

Meghan
Meghan
  • Updated

Welcome to the ninth volume of our 2023 product release notes! We’ve been working hard to bring you performance improvements that add value to your work. Read on to learn about the product enhancements and bug fixes released in September 2023.

Notebook

Benchling Notebook helps users log their experiments, create protocols, and capture results against their samples.

Merge cells in structured tables [2023.9.N.1]

Users can merge cells of the same data type in Structured tables to replicate the same value across the range.

Molecular Biology

Benchling’s Molecular Biology is a cutting edge in silico design tool that supports the latest scientific workflows.

Find and replace nucleotides in bulk [2023.9.MB.1]

Users can now select multiple oligos to modify from the expanded listings page and use Find and Replace to edit the monomers in bulk.

Transcription links [2023.9.MB.2]

Users can now use transcription links, a new specialized schema metadata field, to connect DNA sequences to their transcribed RNA sequence counterparts. Use them to track linkages to registered RNA sequence entities that can be transcribed from the DNA sequence of interest.

Small Molecule

The molecule entity in Registry helps users model and interact with chemical compounds throughout the platform, enabling users to draw, visualize, store, and search chemical structures.

Bulk find and replace monomers [2023.9.SM.1]

Users can now select multiple oligos to modify from the expanded listings page and use find and replace to edit the monomers in bulk.

In Vivo

Manage in vivo studies with modern software designed for data capture, collaboration, and insights.

Assign animal identifiers alongside measurements in a workflow [2023.9.IV.1]

Users can now scan animal IDs into the same form as recording body weights in In Vivo workflows to streamline the animal registration process.

Admin configurable study code templates [2023.9.IV.2]

Tenant admins can now create and manage multiple study code templates.

Study team members have Write permissions by default [2023.9.IV.3]

All new members added to the Team section of a study are automatically given Write permissions, unless manually changed to Read permissions.

Workflows

Workflows are a sequence of processes that are performed to answer a research question or synthesize new material. For example, synthesizing a new set of proteins from supernatants, or improving the transduction process.

Custom request forms [2023.2.WF.1]

Admins can now configure custom forms for Workflows in template collections. When creating a task group, users can select a form tied to the Task schema, then fill it out.

Registry and Inventory

The Registry and Inventory combine to form an extremely powerful solution for life sciences R&D samples. The Registry can be used to model and log any biological entities while the Inventory provides an interactive digital window into the physical storage system of your lab.

Plate and box visualization, table, and metadata are now in separate tabs [2023.9.RI.1]

Three new tabs display for all plates and boxes: 

  • Plate or Box
  • Contents - includes the table with containers, contents, and container metadata
  • Metadata - includes the plate- or box-level metadata

Insights

Insights enables users to query, visualize, and share high quality, structured data that resides in Benchling.

Released JMP Add-in 1.0.0 [2023.9.IN.1]

The new JMP Add-in version includes basic logging for observability and clearer error messages when step data can't be written back to Benchling.

Access Management

Access management is the way customers control who is able to access which resources, and includes things like project permissions, access policies, and admin roles.

Capability management changes apply to orgs and teams [2023.9.AM.1]

Changing capabilities on an organization or team now only applies those changes to the members of the group. For example, if the admin adds Registry to the organization, then everyone in the organization will get the Registry capability, and the developers in the company retain their Developer Platform capability since it wasn’t part of the change made to the organization.

Changes to a user's email address log the user out of all sessions [2023.9.AM.2]

When a user's email address changes, all of that user's active sessions end, and they must re-authenticate before they can take another action. Previously, this only happened when users changed their own email address.

Application Core

To create a seamless Benchling experience, our platform must be consistent, compliant and predictable. The Application Core provides the central capabilities platform to create a smoother user experience.

Warehouse upgraded to Postgres 14.8 [2023.9.APP.1]

The Warehouse was upgraded to the latest Long Term Support version, as the previous version was nearing end of life in AWS.

App Config update webhooks [2023.9.APP.2]

Updates made to an app's App Configuration now send a webhook to the app's webhook URL.

Compliance Controls

With Compliance Controls, gathering required information for compliance is simple, intuitive, and performant. The team’s primary focus is on our auditing platform but we also own exporting and archiving.

All non-academic customers can now export audit logs in bulk using global search [2023.9.CC.1]

All non-academic customers can now export audit logs in bulk, including sequences and plasmids, using global search. This was previously only available to enterprise customers.

Developer Platform

Our developer platform is fundamental to centralizing and standardizing all your R&D data. Benchling’s APIs and Events are built to match the flexibility and speed of modern life science R&D.

Canvas table block  [2023.9.DP.1]

Users can now add Table blocks to App Canvases. At this time, only string inputs are supported.

Label in Canvas blocks [2023.9.DP.2]

Users can now use the optional Label attribute for Canvas input elements.

Bug Fixes

The following issues were addressed this month:

Notebook

  • Setting precision of a cell to 20 appended random digits to the end of the decimal
  • When using a LookUp table, the column width did not auto-widen to fit the lengthiest values, which ended up cutting off the left-most characters of the values
  • Users could not be found as project collaborators in entry review processes when users did not have their name filed out in settings
  • Review processes disabled when self-review process was present alongside review criteria

Molecular Biology

  • Users could incorrectly create sequences with invalid cross-origin parts via the API
  • Duplicate annotations from parts were stacked in alignments and are now deduplicated to be consistent with the sequence map
  • The Select All Primers checkbox in the primers tool did not correctly enable the Attach Primers button
  • ModifiedAt was earlier than createdAt timestamp for certain entities in the warehouse. Correct CreatedAt timestamps were backfilled

In Vivo

  • After saving, toggle samples did not display as an option under observations in workflow setup
  • Larger samples export files were timing out

Registry and Inventory

  • Validation was not run on schema fields set on storable models, so it was possible to assign an entity in a storable entity link of an incorrect type
  • Using well numbers (1-96) instead of well coordinates (A1-H12) resulted in errors when submitting a transfer table after the initial submission/transfer. Now, we explicitly verify rows using numerical grid positions in transfer notebook tables
  • A call error surfaced if you excluded units from a quantity/concentration value in public api call. It now treats these missing units as None
  • Selecting duplicate items to print barcodes for (e.g. from an inventory table) resulted in an error. Now, we de-duplicate before printing.

Workflows

  • When exporting the Task or Output table as a .csv, rows didn’t correspond to archived tasks or outputs
  • After the flowchart task is already created, when a user added a new task node to the flowchart immediately after the root task node, tasks were not automatically created at the newly added node
  • Task and Output tables failed to submit when the Task or Output schema had a blob link schema field that wasn't visible in the table
  • Large graphs now correctly fit to windows
  • Long Task schemas were displaying errors. They are now capped at 248 characters

Benchling Connect

  • If an output file was processed with a time zone east of UTC, and a schema field of type Date was parsed, the date parsed would be one day earlier than the correct date

Schemas

  • Snapshot field dependencies could be changed from multi-link to single-link which caused inconsistencies with the snapshot field

Access Management

  • Right-click menu did not correctly show the Archive option
  • OIDC timeout behavior changed error codes from 500 to 401
  • We were showing the Request Access tooltip to unauthenticated users even though they can't request anything

Application Core

  • Public projects were unviewable while signed out

Compliance Controls

  • Result schema field name updates did not display in audit logs consistently because name changes for fields on Result schemas required audit log events
  • Parent item type field in audit logs would always be a DNA sequence even if it was another sequence type 

Developer Platform

  • Change detection logic for warehouse sync on containers missed syncs under certain transfer conditions

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