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AI Lab Assistant

An AI assistant for life-sciences R&D, built into your notebook. Unlike a generic chatbot, it works from your lab's own data.

What it does

  • Mines your notebook. It searches your pages, protocols, and results by meaning, and runs precise structured queries over your data tables (clones, oligos, proteins, antibodies…) — exact counts, filtering, listing records. Every answer is grounded in what your lab has actually done, citing the exact pages and records it used.
  • Searches PubMed for external literature when you need it.
  • Molecular cloning helpers. Design PCR primers (Tm/GC), map restriction sites to choose cloning sites, and find matching sequences in your own records so you don't reinvent a construct or primer you already have.
  • Analyzes sequences — DNA/protein length, GC%, reverse complement, translation, ORFs, plasmid checks.
  • Searches PubMed for external literature, and drafts protocols, designs experiments, interprets results.

Turn years of data into discovery

Ask questions across your whole history:

  • "What lentivirus packaging plasmids do we already have?"
  • "Which of our constructs expressed best in E. coli?"
  • "Summarize our AAV production yields over the last three years."

It retrieves from your own records first, so you stop repeating experiments and start building on them.

From data to publication — four tools that do the work

NextELN isn't just where you store results — the AI assistant helps you act on them across the whole research cycle:

  • 📡 Literature radar (Literature in the top nav). Name your topics once; every day NextELN searches PubMed and bioRxiv/medRxiv (via Europe PMC) and files new papers & preprints in your workspace — deduplicated by DOI, with abstracts and PDF links. Never miss a relevant result.
  • 📝 Summarize today's results (✨ Summarize button when editing a page). One click turns a page of raw procedure and data into a clear, editable summary at the top of the entry — you review and save.
  • 📈 Figures from your data (✨ Chart with AI on any data table). The assistant analyzes the numbers, picks the right chart, and draws a publication-ready figure you can drop straight into any notebook page.
  • 📄 Draft & grow your manuscript (Manuscripts in the top nav). Give it a title and project details and it writes a structured first draft; as results come in, pull data from your tables and pages and it updates the manuscript so your paper grows with your work.
  • 📊 Data → PowerPoint (Presentations in the top nav). Turn a data table into a results deck — the AI writes the narrative and builds charts from your real numbers, exported as an editable .pptx.
  • 🧑‍🏫 Lab-meeting deck (Presentations). Auto-summarize your recent results into a lab-meeting presentation — agenda, what's new, key charts, and next steps.
  • 💼 Business-development deck (Presentations). Draft an investor/partner pitch deck from your product and project details — problem, solution, technology, market, and the ask.
  • 📰 Scientific-meeting abstract (Presentations). Write a structured conference abstract (Background · Methods · Results · Conclusion) grounded in your project and data.
  • 🧬 Molecular-biology bench tools (in the assistant). Sequence viewer for DNA/RNA/plasmid maps, PCR primer design, restriction-site mapping, and find-a-matching-sequence across your own clones and oligos.

Every tool runs on your AI key (Claude or OpenAI) or Managed AI, and stays grounded in your own records.

Setup

  1. Add an AI key in Admin → AI (your own Claude or OpenAI key, or turn on Managed AI). Claude is preferred for full Claude for Life Sciences capabilities.
  2. Build your vector index once (Search → Build) so the assistant can search your data by meaning — see AI search & your indexing key.
  3. Open the assistant in the app and ask away.

Migrating an existing lab's data in first? See Data migration & services.