About
People
Prof. Brian Kvitko PI
Overall Goal
Preserving lab knowledge as students graduate and are replaced with newcomers.
Approach
Investing in a secure and consistent data storage solution from Labguru.
Results
- Labguru centralizes all of the lab’s data, facilitating the preparation of manuscripts, reports, and presentations.
- Labguru’s lab notebook entries are built in a structured way that requires information to be entered into the same fields every time, forcing team members to think in a structured way and facilitating the training of newcomers.
- Researchers can find information on experiments at least twice as fast as they could with their own paper notebooks, and 5 times as fast as they could with the notebooks of previous lab members.
Prof. Brian Kvitko
PI
Prof. Brian Kvitko heads the plant pathology lab at the University of Georgia. His research, which is supported by the US Department of Agriculture, investigates interactions between the plant immune system and bacterial pathogens. Humans possess an adaptive immune system, meaning that they produce antibodies and adapt to new types of pathogens. Plants, on the other hand, cannot adapt to new pathogens. They are genetically programmed to defend themselves against known foes, and defenses against new pathogens can only arise on an evolutionary time scale. Bacterial pathogens are especially challenging because they evolve quickly, while their plant hosts struggle to keep up. In agriculture, entire fields often consist of genetic clones, meaning that a single novel pathogen possesses the potential to wipe out a year’s crop.
One of Prof. Kvitko’s projects concerns how plants handle the bacteria inside them. Humans have sterilizing immunity, which means that our bodies remove all pathogens to maintain completely sterile internal spaces. But when bacteria invade plants, the plants’ form of immunity keeps them from spreading disease without eliminating them. These bacteria enjoy nutrition, water and space at the plants’ expense, but they fail to proliferate. Prof. Kvitko’s team is investigating what the plants are doing to maintain these pathogens and restrict their growth, and why.
The team is also studying a bacterial pathogen of the Vidalia sweet onion, a locally grown onion variety. This bacterium, known as Pantoea, produces a herbicide that kills the Vidalia plant, doing away with its immune system. Interestingly, Pantoea is uniquely capable of tolerating the reactive sulfur compounds released by the plant’s dead cells, allowing it to thrive and spread to nearby plants and rendering it a crucial subject for research.
Choosing Labguru
Prof. Kvitko knows that paper lab notebooks are virtually useless outside of the hands of the person who wrote it. That is why he looked around for an alternative when he founded his lab. A colleague of his, who manages a large team working on a variety of complex projects, recommended Labguru, and Prof. Kvitko was hooked. His team now uses Labguru to maintain an archive of data and interpretability and for other aspects of research laboratory management, such as maintaining its collections inventory. Prof. Kvitko is also impressed with Labguru’s information preservation - as his students graduate and move on, Labguru notebooks store the lab’s "institutional knowledge".
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Training and Lab Management
Prof. Kvitko happily reports that Labguru provides a great platform for onboarding. His team uses it to store central onboarding documents and to direct newcomers to required safety training. It is also used to store permit documents and SOPs so they are easily accessible by all lab members.
Moreover, the lab notebook entries are built in a structured way that requires information to be entered into the same fields every time, forcing team members to think in a structured way. The organized, digital format is incredibly useful for new lab members learning lab techniques or tracking down an experiment they need to repeat. Labguru boasts a very shallow learning curve, and newcomers quickly come to see its value.
Labguru allows Prof. Kvitko to keep an eye on what his team members are doing, which helps him stay involved in their research. He uses the platform to easily get key pieces of information from people’s data just by accessing their digital notes. For Prof. Kvitko, having all of his team’s research at his fingertips has been a life saver for preparing manuscripts, reports, and presentations.
Research under COVID-19 restrictions
When Prof. Kvitko contacted colleagues requesting research information during lockdowns, many of those who still rely on paper notebooks replied that they lacked access to their information. Prof. Kvitko’s team, on the other hand, has been using Labguru to access their data remotely since the beginning of the pandemic. Since the team members could not use the lab simultaneously, they used Labguru to schedule shifts and let others know when they would be coming in, which helped keep their projects afloat.
If you’re starting a new lab or looking to make the switch over to an ELN and LIMS system, Labguru is definitely worth the investment.
ROI from Labguru
Prof. Kvitko estimates that with Labguru, researchers can find information on experiments at least twice as fast as they could with their own paper notebooks and 5 times as fast as they could with the notebooks of previous lab members. This saves each team member around 2 hours a week. “If you’re starting a new lab or looking to make the switch over to an ELN and LIMS system, Labguru is definitely worth the investment,” says Prof. Kvitko.