Overview, Concept & Structure

At the outset it was clear that the Ames Study Manager should be able to accommodate the varied methodologies employed by different laboratories without compromising ease of use. Furthermore, it needs to be capable of handling large amounts of complex data. For these reasons, it was decided to interface the program to an Oracle relational database for security of data and audit trails.

This Study has a single Experiment with its one set of treatment plates linked to one set of control plates. » Show diagram

This diagram demonstrates sharing of Controls within Experiment Folders for two concurrent Studies. » Show diagram

This diagram demonstrates that experiments can share Controls on a strain-by-strain basis. » Show diagram

Conceptually, the program links a particular Test Substance to one or more Studies. Each Study consists of one or an extended series of Experiments. An Experiment consists of the treatment plates for all of the strains used, doses, number of replicates and metabolic activation.

The program is structured to allow concurrent strain-specific positive and negative Controls with or without metabolic activation to be shared between different experiments whether they are part of the same or a different study. To achieve this, the program groups together plates generated as controls for a particular set of treatments into an Experiment Folder. Each folder will contain plates which share a common incubation time, method etc. In practice, an experiment folder is likely to contain details of all experiment and control plates to be created on a particular day.

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