The 11 Best Apps for Your Lab

lab-lady

You might have made hotel reservations or downloaded music from your smart phone or tablet, but now you even have the ability to conduct your research from the palm of your hand.

The mobile era has arrived — smart phones and tablets have taken over many day-to-day activities, from ordering takeout to scanning digital boarding passes at the airport. So why not leverage these tools to make lab research easier as well?

Plenty of medical research apps have flooded the market over the past six years or so, but not all have delivered on promised functionality, making some scientists wary of their worth. However, a handful of mobile apps have risen in popularity and demonstrated practical benefits for lab work. Based on user ratings and recommendations from real researchers, here are the top 11 smart device programs for scientific lab work.

Cell Imaging HD

For projects involving fluorescence microscopy, this app allows researchers to locate and visualize reagents, fluorescent dyes, and protocols. It’s specifically designed for research involving cell biology and syncs with nearly all major microscope systems.

CloningBench

From finding the right competent cell to identifying the best Anza restriction enzyme, CloningBench offers tools to help guide important decisions in cloning research. Its features include a molar quantities calculator, gene size estimator, bacterial growth timer, and more.

PCalc

PCalc is one of the highest-rated scientific apps in the mobile sphere. Whether you’re an engineer or endocrinologist, this app’s extensive toolkit of unit conversions and notation features — amid a long list of other calculating abilities — will replace those Texas Instruments dinosaurs in no time. There’s also an Apple Watch version for those who like to crunch numbers on their wrist.

Hivebench

As all researchers know, the lab notebook is the magnum opus of every experiment. It has to be detailed, organized, and precise for a study to be successful. Hivebench seeks to replace the paper notebooks of yesteryear with a mobile version that allows you to securely collaborate with your team and increase efficiency.

Evernote

Similarly, Evernote is widely used by professionals across a wide range of fields, from business to politics to science, to take notes and stay organized. Unlike Hivebench, it was not designed with lab research specifically in mind. However, it is simple to use and available across multiple devices.

Fluorescence SpectraViewer

Fluorescence SpectraViewer is the mobile extension of ThermoFisher’s online tool for plotting and comparing spectra. It translates configurations into a simple, printable format that can be shared via email. Researchers can compare up to five emission and five excitation filters per plot on this mobile interface.

JuiceSSH

This “secure shell” client allows researchers to remotely monitor and control systems from a mobile terminal window. It can start and stop automated laboratory tasks from anywhere, and is especially useful for checking in on big computational projects like genome assemblies. Researchers are also able to make emergency interventions faster — saving countless hours of “clean up” time.

PubChase

The PubChase app keeps the latest in biomedical publications at your fingertips. Users can search the entire database of literature, in addition to receiving customized recommendations and saving articles to read later. It’s PubMed on your smartphone, anytime you want to use it.

BioGene

BioGene is a quick reference tool for looking up the genes frequently used in medical research. From zebrafish to yeast, scientists can get the pertinent details about the genes appearing in relevant publications — a great complement to literature apps like PubChase and Docphin.

 

Docphin

Awarded “Best App for Doctors” and “Best App for Medical News & Journals” by Apple Inc. in 2015, Docphin is a robust app for tracking and organizing the latest publications in specific topic areas. It’s easy to create alerts for specialties and diseases, and the app will send you an individualized email every week with an overview of the hottest new studies in your field. With the ability to subscribe to your preferred journals and share collections of articles with peers, users can curate the most interesting literature and help keep colleagues up-to-date.

ResearchKit

Rather than a singular app, Apple’s ResearchKit is an open source platform that allows scientists to build customized mobile applications for their studies. It doesn’t calculate unit conversions or provide publications; the purpose is actually gathering participant data. Researchers can track and monitor participants through their iPhones, making it much easier to recruit and enroll eligible individuals. Currently, the platform has been used to develop apps for studies related to postpartum depression, diabetes, and much more.

New applications for science are coming out all the time, so it is a good idea to keep an eye on the iTunes and Android app stores for emerging tools that might save time, increase accuracy, and add to your knowledge base, all right from your smart device. There is little to lose by trying out these technologies, especially because many of them are free or very low cost.

If the trend continues, researchers could find their work lives substantially enhanced, both in terms of efficiency and the ability to run experiments remotely. What if you could control all the systems of your study from an iPhone? And collect participant data with a fraction of the in-person hospital visits? Undoubtedly, mobile apps for medical research have the potential to be life changing for scientists and patients alike.

  • Mapes is a Washington D.C.-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Endocrine News. She wrote about the impact of wearables on patient treatment in the November issue.

You may also like

  • Full Circle: Q&A with New Endocrinology Editor-in-Chief, Zane Andrews, PhD

    When Zane Andrews, PhD, published his very first scientific paper while working on his PhD in 2001, it was in the pages of the Endocrine Society’s Endocrinology. This month, he assumes his newest role as Endocrinology’s editor-in-chief. This month, Zane Andrews, PhD, of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, will begin his tenure as editor-in-chief of…

  • An Enduring Dream of Science: Q&A with Vincent Prevot, PhD

    When he was only 16, Vincent Prevot, PhD, became the youngest member of the French Society of Herpetology. Endocrine News finds out how a teen’s fascination with snakes gradually evolved into a passion for neuroendocrinology that resulted in being the recipient of the Endocrine Society’s 2024 Edwin B. Astwood Award for Outstanding Research in Basic…