With fall almost over, the life science industry continues to persevere through this global pandemic. We've seen our customers adopting new digital strategies, leveraging shift-based time in the lab, and driving innovation on needed therapeutics and vaccines, including those directly targeted at COVID-19. The importance and impact of the research that our customers do has never been greater.
Benchling released dozens of new features and enhancements across all of our applications to continue driving our mission of accelerating life sciences R&D. One feature that we’re really excited about is bulk codon optimization and back translation, which helps our customers dramatically increase their sequence design throughput. Read on to learn more about this and other new features below.
Accelerate Throughput With Bulk Codon Optimization And Bulk Back Translation
What it is:
Benchling’s codon optimization and back translation tool streamlines the process of designing a DNA sequence to optimize protein expression in a target organism. This tool leverages a trusted algorithm, balances codon prevalence with other important input parameters, and provides powerful customization for GC content, uridine depletion, and other advanced parameters to provide high quality results.
What’s new:
We now support the use of codon optimization and back translation in a high throughput manner boosting productivity significantly. Additionally, we added a new parameter and made several user interface enhancements to make this tool even more user friendly and relevant to your research.
New features that make it possible:
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Bulk codon optimization and back translation: This new feature allows users to select existing DNA sequences or AA sequences from the expanded toolbar view and generate corresponding codon optimized sequences in bulk. This highly requested feature increases sequence design throughput significantly, saving users time and effort. It is especially useful for power users who work with a large number of sequences.
New bulk codon optimization modal
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New “patterns to reduce” parameter: We added a new “patterns to reduce” parameter to codon optimization. This parameter reduces the usage of user specified nucleotide patterns across the entire sequence. For example CpG motifs in pDNA are known to contribute to immune response and would be a pattern that can be reduced with this new parameter. This powerful new parameter makes the codon optimization tool much more flexible as users can fine tune the output to better fit their research needs.
“Pattern to reduce” configuration menu
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User interface enhancements: As part of the recent updates, we also upgraded several aspects of the codon optimization tool’s user interface (marked in the accompanying screenshot. These changes together make it easier to set up a codon optimization analysis.
(1) Organism is now an optional parameter: This helps users perform codon optimization based on their preferred parameter selection without having unnecessary competing constraints.
(2) Added visual counts to the tabbed parameters: For the tabbed parameters such as “Avoided cut sites”, “Preserved cut sites”, “Protected regions”, and “Patterns to reduce”, users can now see a count of the constraints configured across these parameters. This helps users keep track of their selections while setting up the tool.
(3) Added a “Remove all” button to quickly clear out existing constraints: All the tabbed parameters such as “Avoided cut sites”, “Preserved cut sites”, “Protected Regions” and “Patterns to Reduce”, now have a “Remove all” button. This helps clear out existing constraints with the click of a button.
Three new UI enhancements to the codon optimization modal
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Saving codon optimization parameters to sequence description tab: With this new update, the detailed history of codon optimization and results from the analysis are automatically added to the description tab of the corresponding codon optimized sequence. This makes it easy to trace and understand all the changes made by the codon optimization tool.
Codon optimization details added to the description tab of a sequence
What you can do with it:
Codon optimization and back translation are useful across a variety of research areas and industries where protein expression needs to be optimized in a host system.
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Antibody production
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Enzyme technologies
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Fermentation optimization
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Plant biotechnology
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Vaccine development
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Viral vector production
To learn more about our other major releases by product, read along.
NOTEBOOK
Benchling’s Notebook was designed to promote higher quality data capture with an exceptional and intuitive user experience. Recent releases significantly improve the usability of the transfer table and add the option to integrate with Box.
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New transfer table
Transfer table is one of the key types of structured tables in Benchling. It is used to transfer samples into or between containers directly within your Notebook entry enabling you to manage samples in the context of your experiment. With the recent releases we have revamped the transfer table to make it more intuitive and user friendly.
Click on the corresponding links to learn more about the transfer table and the new updates. |
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External file integration with Box
Benchling has always supported the integration of Notebook with external file storage systems to fit the unique data storage needs of our customers. We already support integration with file storage systems such as Google Drive and Dropbox. With the latest release, we now support external file integration with Box. This integration allows you to easily connect your Box account, browse Box files directly in Benchling, and drag and drop files directly into Notebook entries. |
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY
Benchling Molecular Biology is a cutting edge, in silico design tool that supports the latest scientific workflows. In addition to the changes to codon optimization discussed at the beginning of this article, recent product updates also add more options to export sequences and sequence-based information.
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More export options for sequences
The ability to export sequences and sequence-based information such as annotations is a critical part of how Benchling enables collaboration and sharing of information between scientists. We added to this capability with recent releases.
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REGISTRY AND INVENTORY
Registry and Inventory are core to modeling data on Benchling and managing critical in-lab samples. With the recent releases we added features related to the new entity type “Mixtures”, expanded support for more bulk actions through spreadsheet uploads, and further improved worklists.
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Deeper integration of “mixtures” across Benchling
Mixtures is a new entity type in Benchling used for managing and tracking samples made up of two or more ingredients such as media, buffers, and formulations. We have added several new functionality to expand the utility of “mixtures” to better meet the needs of your experiments across Benchling.
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Expanded functionality with spreadsheet uploads Spreadsheet uploads is one of the most flexible ways to create or update data in Benchling. This feature is especially more powerful when dealing with large numbers of samples. Recent releases add to this capability.
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Improved collaboration with worklists
Worklists help users work with large sets of samples such as entities, batches, containers, and plates and save scientists time and effort by facilitating bulk actions on large numbers of samples. With the new update, worklists can now be shared with other users, teams, or orgs. This streamlines sample handoffs between users and extends the benefits of worklists across an entire team. |
INSIGHTS
Benchling Insights enables users to leverage their data and run analytics natively. This opens up access to comprehensive operational and scientific insights. We have added several new features to the Insights application which enhance the user experience.
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Insights dashboard embedding in Registry is now in limited availability
Benchling Registry helps centralize all results related to an entity automatically, while Insights helps visualize the results. With this new feature, the Insights dashboards with data visualizations can now be linked to the appropriate Registry entry. This makes it easy to not only centralize but also share results with accompanying analysis. This feature is in limited release. Contact support@benchling.com to enable this feature for your tenant. |
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Improvements to the user experience
We continue to release features that make Insights even more user friendly.
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More relationships in dynamic warehouse diagram
Dynamic warehouse diagram allows users to understand the relationship between different entities, results, requests, workflows, and other schemas. As part of the recent releases, we have added even more relationships to the diagram so that users can set up effective queries quickly. To view the list of supported relationships check this release note. |
LAB AUTOMATION
Benchling for Lab Automation unlocks the potential of your laboratory hardware by integrating Benchling with liquid handlers and analytical instruments. We recently released updates which expand functionality of the Lab Automation product by adding new processing steps, configuration options, and lookup steps.
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Additional processing step options We continue to add more options to the processing step of a run schema to better suit user needs.
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New configuration options We released several updates that provide a greater range of options while configuring your lab automation runs.
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Lookup step updates A handful of new lookup steps were added as part of the recent updates.
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PLATFORM
Benchling’s platform is designed to provide a unified experience and help you easily manage and quickly access your research across Benchling applications. We released several updates that significantly improve search functionality and audit capabilities. We also introduced a brand new way to integrate with Benchling (still in public beta) and added new APIs and new filters for APIs.
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Improved audit capabilities
The audit features on Benchling are critical to enabling enterprise control and regulatory compliance. Benchling already provides robust audit tracking throughout each application. With the new updates, Benchling makes it easy to export these audit logs.
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Search improvements
Benchling search allows users to access their and their team’s research data easily. We continue to add to the search capabilities to increase performance and enhance user friendliness.
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Events public beta Events (beta) is the newest addition to our developer platform. Benchling’s Events allows external services to subscribe to events that are triggered in Benchling (e.g. plasmid registration, request submission, etc.) through the AWS EventBridge system. This brand new class of integrations that react to actions in Benchling has become a necessity for many of our customers working with advanced use cases and related IT infrastructure. After successful adoption of Events in the early access program, we are excited to open up the functionality to a wider audience as part of this beta release. You are eligible to access Events (beta) if you already have access to our developer platform. Contact support@benchling.com to have this feature activated for your team’s use. Learn more with this getting started guide. |
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New APIs Benchling’s APIs are built to match the flexibility and speed of modern life science R&D. We continue to add new APIs that extend functionality and provide new ways to interact with data in Benchling. As part of the recent releases, we have added APIs for Run, Request, and Result schemas that allow you to retrieve the information by their unique ID. |
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New filters for APIs Benchling allows you to filter API calls to identify the specific information required. With the latest updates, we have expanded these filters.
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