LaBook Download

A desktop app for the wet lab Free beta

Plan it, run it, write it up. All in one place.

LaBook keeps your experiments’ timings, your notebook and your analysis tools together on your computer, so the protocol, the blot you ran and the figure you made all end up in the same record.

See what it does Download for Mac, Windows or Linux
LaBook’s calendar: four experiments laid out step by step across October, with lab meetings, a seminar and cell feeds on the days they fall.
Plan Protocols turned into dated steps on your calendar. Record A notebook page for every day, with your results marked. Analyse Gels, blots, microscopy, plasmids and figures. Keep track Fridges, freezers, cells and recipes, shared with your lab.

Plan

Your protocol’s timings, on a real calendar.

Write a protocol once, with its timings in hours or days: transfect, then harvest 66 hours later. Start an experiment from it, and every step lands on a date and a time that you can see, move and tick off.

  • Your own events too. Lab meetings, classes and seminars, once or every week. LaBook tells you when a step falls in the middle of one.
  • Days you’re out. Mark them, and see straight away if a step lands on one.
  • Cells to feed. The flasks you’re growing show up on the day they need feeding.
Two weeks of the calendar: experiment steps, a lab meeting and a seminar on the same day, and feeding reminders for a flask of cells.

Record

A notebook that keeps up with the bench.

Every day gets its own page: notes, tables, protocols, calculations, pictures and files, each one tied to the experiment it came from.

  • Tick Is this a result? and find every result again with one click.
  • Gel and image analyses are saved into the notebook with their numbers.
  • Search everything you’ve written, filter it by kind or date, and export it.
  • Beside the book: what’s due today, and one box to look up any recipe, tube, flask or run.
The notebook: today’s result, a quantification table from Friday and a note from Thursday, with what is due today beside them.

Analyse

The analysis, right next to the experiment.

Four tools built into LaBook. Each comes with a made-up example to try it on, and a ? beside every setting that says what it does.

Open a picture of a gel or blot, up to 16-bit TIFF. LaBook straightens it, finds the lanes and bands, sizes them against your ladder, takes off the background and quantifies a western against its loading control, gel by gel, then graphs it.

The gel analyzer: a western blot straightened, its ten lanes outlined, and the ladder lane’s profile with its bands sized in kDa.

Open TIFF and OME-TIFF stacks, every channel at its own depth. See each channel beside the merge, measure areas, find cells and count their foci, measure colocalization and fit FRAP recovery. Then lay out a figure with scale bars and insets.

The Images tool counting foci: cells outlined in yellow over a three-channel picture, with the settings used to find them.

Keep your lab’s plasmids and primers in one library. Draw maps, plan digests and see the gel they would give, design primers with their melting temperatures, plan mutagenesis and cloning, and check sequencing reads against the plasmid.

The Cloning tool: a circular plasmid map with its features and every enzyme that cuts it once.

Paste your numbers, open a file or bring a table straight from the notebook. Choose bars with every point, dot, box or violin plots, stacked bars or a heatmap, then export an SVG, a TIFF at 300 or 600 dpi, or a slide.

The figure maker: a bar graph with every replicate shown as a point, two treatments across three genotypes.

Keep track

Know where everything is.

Fridges & Freezers lays out every box as the grid it is, slot by slot, in the fridge or freezer it lives in. Name a box for enzymes, and the Cloning tool knows which ones you have.

Cells keeps each line and every flask: passages, splits, feeds and freezes. Say how often a line is fed, and LaBook puts the next feed on your calendar.

Recipes and the lab’s calculators sit alongside them.

Cells: a human line fed every four days, its flask at passage 12, and a yeast strain.
Fridges and Freezers: the −20 °C freezer’s enzyme box as a nine-by-nine grid, each enzyme in its slot.

Your lab

Made for a lab, not just for you.

Shared where it should be

Recipes, fridges and freezers, cells and calculators belong to the whole lab, and anyone in it can update them as things change.

Your notebook is yours

Everyone keeps their own notebook. The rest of the lab can read it; only you can write in it.

Works without a connection

No signal in the cold room? LaBook keeps a copy of your work to read, and holds what you record at the bench until you’re back online.

Explains itself

A ? beside every setting says what it does. Every tool has a guide, and example data to try it on.

Opens your files as they are

TIFF and OME-TIFF images, PNG and JPEG, GenBank and FASTA sequences, and sequencing traces.

Gets better with you

Ideas, problems and questions go from the Feedback button straight to the LaBook team, and new versions arrive on their own: LaBook keeps itself up to date.

Download LaBook

Install it, open it, and sign in or make your account.

Free beta Free for students and labs. LaBook is still growing: if something is missing or not right, tell the LaBook team with the Feedback button in the app.

MacApple silicon: M1 and later.pkg MacIntel processor.pkg WindowsWindows 10 or 11.exe LinuxUbuntu, Debian, Mint.deb
Which one, and opening it the first time
  • Which Mac? Apple menu › About This Mac shows either a Chip (Apple M1, M2 and on) or an Intel Processor.
  • Mac: LaBook is not yet signed by Apple, so the first time the Mac may say the installer cannot be opened. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway.
  • Windows: if Windows protected your PC appears, click More info, then Run anyway. It installs for you alone, with no administrator needed.
  • Linux: open the .deb with your Software app and click Install, or run sudo apt install ./LaBook-Linux.deb.
  • LaBook keeps your work in its online database, so you need an internet connection to sign in.