Reference columns
In life science research, it is often important to capture relationships, such as the chemical, antibody, or cell line that was characterized by an assay.
In your data hub, you can capture relationships in two ways:
- Reference columns: As discussed here, users can use reference columns to capture relationships — a link between a cell of a specific row and another row, potentially in another database. As an example, a row in an inventory database could reference a row in a cell line database.
- Notebook mentions: Inside notebooks, users can use mentions to capture relationships between notebooks and rows, databases, and folders.
Example: Plasmid screen
The first step of many discovery programs is to screen a library for potential drug candidates. In Deep Origin, a screen can be captured using multiple databases and reference columns which capture the relationships among them.
- A database of plasmids to screen.
- A database of the experiments used to screen the plasmids.
- Within the experiments database, a reference column which captures the plasmid characterized by each experiment.
Creating references
- Navigate to the cell where you would like to capture a reference to another row.
- Double-click on the cell. This will open a dropdown menu which lists the rows of referenced database.
- Select the desired row of the referenced database.
Viewing the back-references to a row
Once a reference from a cell to row is recorded, the linked row will be rendered in the cell. Often is also useful to trace references from the reverse or back perspective — from rows back to their linked cells. For example, it is often useful to be able to identify all of the assays in which a chemical, antibody, or cell line was characterized.
To view the back-references for a row, navigate to the “Back references” section of the page view for the row.