A shipment arrives
The package from your vendor shows up at the loading dock. Three vials of antibody Ab-1042, 1 mL each at 5 mg/mL. Vendor lot number A1042-0823.
In Affinity, the lot is recorded once by specifying the vendor and its lot number, then the three vials are placed into their freezer positions. From there, it's first-class: every assay that pulls one of those vials, every clone made from one, every protein expressed from one, all ties back to this shipment. For plasmid lots, a built-in sequence check confirms the vendor-shipped sequence matches the expected vector before it goes in the freezer.
You make something at the bench
You finish a plasmid prep, or an expression run, or a tissue harvest from an animal study. The new sample shows up in Affinity automatically; the workflow that produced it puts it there.
A plasmid construction produces a plasmid sample with its prep size and recovered DNA captured alongside. An expression run produces a protein sample with its transfection volume and yield. A tissue harvest produces a tissue sample with the study and project it came from. You don't have to register in-house samples by hand; the work that produces them is the registration.
You go find a sample
You need a vial of Ab-1042 for tomorrow's ELISA.
A search turns up the vial and shows its location as a path you can follow, from freezer to shelf to box to slot, and at a click you've navigated straight to the box in inventory. Pull the vial.
The sample's own record carries the full picture: the antibody's isotype, the vendor lot it came from, the assays it's been part of, the samples it was derived from, the samples derived from it. Library samples show transformant counts and links out to their Sanger and NGS profiling runs. Clone samples carry the lineage of the hybridoma fusion or single-B-cell event they trace back to. Tissue samples link back to the in-vivo study in which they were collected. The list of samples isn't "1.5 mL tube #4711" — it's the molecule, its history, and where to find it.
A vial leaves the lab
A collaborator needs a vial of Ab-1042. You pack it and ship it.
Checking the vial out records who has it, when it left, and why; when it comes back, checking it in captures the updated volume so the stock count reflects what actually returned. The same flow covers shared instruments, off-site analyses, and any time a container leaves the freezer for more than a few hours.
You need to know what's on hand
The next antibody order is in two weeks. The lab manager wants to know whether to reorder Ab-1042 now or wait.
The inventory report answers it directly: stock rolled up by reagent, expandable from each reagent to its lots to the individual aliquots, with total volume and amount at every level. The Ab-1042 row shows exactly how much is left and where each vial sits, and a team that organizes stock by program or customer rather than by molecule can roll the totals up that way instead.
The lab gets rearranged
You added a new -80 °C freezer last month and you're moving samples around to make room.
The inventory browser shows the lab's whole layout, arranged as you would expect to find them: rooms or areas, then freezers and fridges, then shelves, racks, and boxes, and finally the labware that lives in each. Rearranging it is direct: drag a rack to another shelf, add a shelf to the new freezer, drop the boxes onto it. Affinity refuses moves that don't make physical sense (a freezer can't go inside a box), and every sample's location trail and every report updates the moment the move is saved.
