Introduction
Welcome to OpenSpecimen 101!
The following course is designed to provide guidance on how to use and navigate features in OpenSpecimen, thereby assisting you with managing your specimen storage and processing within a lab for a clinical study.
By the end of this course, you should be able to understand how to choose your collection protocol, register participants, enter visit information and collect specimens, process specimen derivatives and aliquots, and manage specimen storage.
How samples are processed and tracked in OpenSpecimen:
Primary samples that are collected directly from a participant are typically processed into other sample types which are either stored or aliquoted and stored. (expand below for explanation)
This is an example of a typical lifecycle of whole blood processed into serum or DNA and then aliquotted.
In OpenSpecimen, this hierarchical relationship is represented in a parent-child structure. Samples of any lineage can be parents of additional samples. So these relationships do not stop at the aliquot level.
If a specimen type changes from the parent to the child, then the child sample is ‘Derived’ from the parent.
If the specimen type does not change, the child specimen is considered an ‘Aliquot’.
For instance, it’s possible to make a primary cultured cell line from a frozen aliquot of PBMCs. This relationship is captured by creating a derivative from an aliquot.
OpenSpecimen uses colored dots as a visual indicator of status to show the status of a sample:
(green) = sample available
(red) = sample processed into another product and is no longer available (ie,closed)
(yellow) = pending
(grey) = missed or not collected
(pink) = pooled
(purple) = reserved
(blue) = distributed
Click on the topics below to get started!
Table of Contents
Using Queries
Printing Labels
Shipping and Distributing Specimens