This is the main Mosaic homepage you come to when you access the system. In the top right hand corner you can see who is currently logged on. Depending on the role you have, you'll have access to various menu items. As an administrator, you can access all of the functionality and the submenus underneath these along with access to the admin functionalities as well.
This is where you can visualise your physical inventory and it's a digital representation of your hierarchical structure. The folders represent buildings and rooms and labs, while the safe icons represent manual stores such as your fridges and freezers where you're storing your inventory items.
These locations, the stores and the internal structure of the stores can be set up through the user interface. Here, you can see that in the liquid nitrogen freezer, stack one, draw one, has a number of containers in this box.
If you want to move things around, you can simply drag and drop items to move them from one position to another. If that was done by mistake, you can undo your move and the item will go back to its original position. These move events are captured in the audit trail, meaning Mosaic will have a record that items have been moved from one place to another.
One of the features in Mosaic is the dashboard functionality, which enables you to visualise certain aspects of your current inventory in a graphical form. To access the dashboard, you go to query and dashboards.
This displays your current dashboard information. So here, we’re viewing the different numbers of samples per substance type that are in the inventory. You can see that there are some tubes of antibodies, bacterial cells, DNA, et cetera.
It is possible to edit this and to view other information about your inventory. To do this, you can choose your dashboard and edit the widgets. Just click on a plus icon anywhere to add a new widget.
So if you want to view some information about how full the stores are, your fridges and freezers, you can select that and if you want to view that in a horizontal bar chart form, you can then add that to the dashboard and resize it however you want it. By clicking save, the new widget will be added to the dashboard. Now you can see how full your manual stores are.
Mosaic also has a functionality called store access control list. If you’re logged in here as an administrator, you can see all these different stores. If you look at the same system where the user is logged in as a self-service operator, you can see that an operator does not have the admin rights.
If we look at the location browser, it looks a bit different. For example, the fridge, you can see the store exists, but it's got a padlock icon, which means the user is not able to pick items from that store. Going back to an administrator view, you can see there's a store called freezer one. As the operator, you don't even see this because the user doesn't have the rights to view or use that store. So it's as if the store doesn't exist and therefore they can't see the items that are in it.
To create a substance, you go to inventory and click create substance. Users are then presented with a dropdown list of the different substance types that are configured in the system. Mosaic is substance type agnostic.
As you can see here, we've got small molecules, cells and DNA. Any type of substance you want to track, you can model in Mosaic. We will have a look at how to do that later. If you choose the mammalian cell substance type and click next, you’re presented with a list of substance properties or information that can be recorded about this batch of substance that you want to register. When you see an asterisk, these are mandatory fields so you have to provide them. And through the user interface, you can define any properties that you want to be mandatory.
ID and name are what we call the substance identifiers. ID is akin to a lot number or a batch number. It's just a unique alphanumeric string that identifies that batch of a substance. Whereas name is non-unique. It's just something more human-readable. So you could have two substances with the same name, but a different ID. So that would represent two batches of the same thing.
Let us go ahead and fill in some of these values. When it comes to creating an ID, Mosaic can generate that for you automatically. There's an internal range that's being used, and Mosaic will just give you the next available number from that range. But you can of course provide your own ID. For example, if you are migrating legacy data. The only requirement is that the ID you import is unique and not used by any other substance.
You need to fill in the properties that are marked as mandatory. As you can see, we have a mixture of property types. So you can have drop-down lists, date pickers et cetera.
You can have whole numbers as well as free text fields. And these can be configured through the user interface as well. You can also do things such as insert hyperlinks to the documents stored on your network. And you can also add document attachments to a substance record.
Once you’ve filled out the required information, you click create. Mosaic has now created this substance and it's assigned an ID.
To then go and create some tubes of this substance, from this page, you can click the create tubes button and here is where you can define how many tubes are being created. So if the containers are already barcoded, you can scan the barcodes into the system here.
But if the containers are not pre-barcoded and you want Mosaic to generate one for you, you can choose the generate option and tell the system how many tubes you're creating.
So we are creating ten tubes of this substance. Similarly to the substance ID range, there is a Mosaic barcode range in the system and it will provide the next ten available numbers from that range. We then move on to tell the system the type of labware we're creating. These are some predefined tube types that come with the system but you can create your own.
In this example, we’re going to choose a two milliliter cryovial. You need to define the concentration of the cell in each tube. Let's say there are three million cells per milliliter and a volume of one milliliter of cells in each of the containers. So that's the minimum information you need to provide, but there are other fields that could be set as well.
By clicking the create button, Mosaic has now created ten tubes and assigned a barcode for each one. If you wanted to print labels for each of these containers, you would click the print labels button, set a label template, and the printer you want to print to. And then you could fix each of those labels onto the containers.
The next thing you might want to do is put these away into a store. From here, you can add things to your place list. Here are the ten items in the place list. Before we go and put them away, let's take a chance to look at how the information is displayed in Mosaic.
So if you click on one of these barcode hyperlinks, you can view the details of the container. You can see the container barcode, the labware type, and when it was created. If you set an expiry date, you would see that as well. Over on the right-hand side, you can see details about what's in the container. You can see the substance type and the batch number and the name and the volume and concentration. If you want to view the detailed batch information, simply click the batch number hyperlink, and you can view those substance properties. Mosaic also displays where the container currently is.
So, we've just created these and they exist in the lab location. We will now proceed to put these away into a store. If you go back to my place list, this is where the items are. Now you often know which store you want to put items in, but you do not know where there is space. So what you can do is just say, “I want to put them in the liquid nitrogen freezer”.
If you are placing a large number of items, you want to make sure they are all placed together in your boxes, rather than one in one space, one in another space and others elsewhere. If you check the only contiguous space option, it will place all of the containers together rather than spread them out. If you then click assign place location, Mosaic will assign a position in the box for each of the containers. Here we are viewing it as a list, but you can also view it as a map.
When you view it as a map, you see a graphic of the box. So you can see it in liquid nitrogen freezer one, stack one, draw one. And this is where all the items have to go. If you had not chosen the option to use contiguous space, it would have put five containers here, two here and so on. But because we asked them all to be placed together, it is found a position in the box with a space for them all to be placed adjacently.
So you can view the map or the list and it can be printed off. Once you physically place the items in the required positions, you can complete the placing in Mosaic. So those items have now been placed into a store.
When you go to the location browser and look in stack one of the liquid nitrogen freezer and draw one, you can see the ten items that have been placed.
If you view the container we looked at previously, the location has now been updated because the system knows it is now in a storage area. And that move into the storage area has been captured in the audit trail. If you click on the audit trail of this container, you can see the most recent event was the item was frozen and moved from a lab location into the freezer location.
So there we looked at how to create a substance via the user interface and then create some tubes of that substance and we add them into a place list and put them into a store.
That method is very good when you are creating a single substance and multiple tubes of that substance, where they are all the same tube type, the same volume and the same concentration.
However, you might want to create a mixture of different types of substances and containers with different volumes and concentrations in the same operation. And to do that, you can use what is called ‘labware importer’. Here is an example of a labware importer file.
In this example, there are four containers, each one is a different container type, different volumes and different concentrations and units. Each container also has a different substance type within it. And then we have headers for the different substance properties. So now we fill in the values in the file accordingly.
For completeness, if we look at this container, currently it does not exist. But we want to import that file to register that container and the other containers within that file. To do that, you go to inventory, import update. And the file you want to import is going to create the labware and the substance together because neither exists.
As you can see from this dropdown list, you can import different file formats for doing different things. We are creating the labware and the substance together. Then browse to our file and click okay. And what Mosaic is doing is picking up the file and making sure all of the information in the file that it needs is present and correct. For example, if a property is configured as a drop-down list, it is making sure the value that you have provided contains valid drop-down list values in Mosaic's database.
If a property is configured as mandatory, it is making sure that there is a value for that property in the file. The import is now complete. When viewing the container again, we can see it now exists.
So, that shows how we get inventory into the system. Let us move on now to look at how we search for items.
For this, Mosaic has an inventory search feature. If you go to query and inventory search, searches can be saved for your own personal use in the “my search area”, or in a shared folder for everyone to use.
If you select one of these searches and open it, you can see there are some criteria already set.
We are looking for some tubes of mammalian cells in this particular freezer. You may want to add to this to focus your search result. For example, if we only want things that are passage less than ten. Maybe you want the name to contain cho. You can add these search criteria and then click search.
Mosaic will then return a list of all the inventory items that meet that criteria. You can see some information about those items, and you can define what this output looks like.
For example, if you want to see the amount of sample in these containers, you can easily edit the search results using the column and sorting tab. If you also want to see the amount information, then you can redisplay the results and so you now see the container volume in our results as well.
From the previous example search, there were lots of inventory items that met that criteria. You may only want to pick one or two of those from the store. To do this, you can select just the ones you want and then export the ones you have selected to a pick list.
Once you have added one of these containers to the pick list, you can go and view the pick list, and see the item. You can also see where it is - in this case, it is in the liquid nitrogen freezer, stack one, draw one, position B three. You can then go to the store, remove that item and when you are done, you can complete that picking operation, and that item has now been removed from the store.
If you view that container, Mosaic knows it is not in a store, but has been picked and is in the lab location. So this is a tube of cells, and one thing you might want to do is re-bank these cells, because there are not many of that batch left in your inventory. So you need to grow them up and re-bank them. You have your file of cells that have now been picked. You have thawed the cells out and you have maybe grown them up for a period of time in the lab to expand the numbers of cells.
You have then harvested all those cells, maybe done a cell count and adjusted the volume to get to the right concentration. And then you have aliquoted those out typically into one or two hundred new vials for freezing down. To model that in Mosaic, here is your source container. And from that, you want to create some new child tubes. You click on the create child tubes button and here is where you define how many you are creating. So you’ve got one tube we started with.
Typically, you may create one or two hundred new vials for banking. But in this example, we are going to create ten new containers. You define the container type that you are creating and the volume in each of your output containers. The starting container is now gone because you’ve used all the contents and you can dispose of your source container.
For these containers that you are creating, you want to register a new substance. It's the same cell line, so the name remains the same, but you want to generate a new batch number. They are also no longer passage five. This new batch is passage ten.
You then click create and you’ve now created your new containers. If required, you can print labels for them, or you can add them to a place list and put them away into a store. One thing to note is if you look at one of these containers, it contains your cells, batch number twelve. You have a link to the parent container to show that this batch of cells in this container came from that parent container.
For a more regular aliquoting process, if we look at another container, the others we created from our labware importer file, we have five hundred microliters of antibody.
If you are just simply aliquoting it out and you're not trying to register a new batch or something, it's a very simple process. In this example, we are going to create some child tubes. We have five hundred microliters in our source container and we want to create five new containers with fifty microliters per container using small one point four milliliter tubes. We're not going to create a new substance, all we are doing is taking some sample from one tube into some new output tubes.
We have still got some sample remaining in our source container, so we're not going to dispose of the source.
By clicking create, the five new output containers have been created. By viewing one of these new containers, you can see the volume is recorded as per the defined transfer volume. You will have a reference to the parent container, which still exists. If you select the parent container, you can see there is now only two hundred and fifty microliters remaining, where there was five hundred.
This is because we transferred fifty microliters into each of these five child tubes. And all those operations are captured in the audit trail. So if you look at the audit trail for this parent container, the most recent events are these five different transfers of fifty microliters out into these different output containers.
Next, we are going to look at some of the administrative operations. We described earlier how Mosaic is substance type agnostic, and that you can create any substance type.
To define the substance type, under admin, there is a substance type menu option. Here, you have a display of all of the currently configured substance types.
These are just examples in the system. If you select one of these substance types, you can edit it and start to add more properties. For example, if the passage number needs to be mandatory, you can make it so by clicking the checkbox.
If you want to add a new property, there is a drop down list that displays all the current substance properties that are configured in the system. So you could select one of those.
Let's say you want to add hazard information - you've added a substance property and if the property you want to add does not exist, you can choose a new property option.
Here's where you define the type of property you want to create. Whether it's a free text field or a document attachment, for example, or a list.
In this case, you want to create a new list property. You can give the property a name and then start adding values to the dropdown list. Then you can click save, and that's created a new list substance property, and added it to our substance type.
To make this mandatory, you can click on the checkbox and then click save. So the next time someone wants to create a substance using that mammalian cell substance type, you can see the hazard information property now appears there.
Here's the newly created list property with the drop down list values that were set. And at any point you can go back to the substance type editor, select a substance type and make any edits you want to. Maybe the list property needs to change. So you could choose your list property and edit that and add a new value to it or inactivate an existing one.
Another administrative feature is the labware type editor. Mosaic comes with a number of different types of labware configured, but as you come across new labware types, under the admin section, you click on labware types and there's a simple wizard to create a new labware type in the system.
Here are some preconfigured examples.
You click create, choose the type of labware you want to create and then give the tube type a name and you can define its maximum volume, then click save.
But if you also have tubes and racks, often a type of tube can only fit in a certain type of rack. You can create an association between a tube type and a rack type, so that when you're using Mosaic to create racks of tubes, Mosaic will validate that you are putting the right tube in the right type of rack.
Creating new users in the system is also an administrative operation. By selecting admin, then users, this is where you can create a new user in the system.
Just define their name and their email address. When you create a user, what you also do is assign them a role in Mosaic. In freezer management, there are three roles.
You have an administrator, you have self-service operator, which can do everything other than the admin features. And then you have what's called a viewer role. You can have as many viewers as you want in a system. There's no cost to that license and they can purely have read-only access to the inventory.
To learn more about Mosaic FreezerManagement, get in touch.
