A construction request hits your bench
Discovery handed over the top three clones from the anti-CD20 campaign with their paired heavy and light variable domains identified. The molecular biology team's task: turn those clones into full-length IgG expression vectors, ready for protein production.
The request lives in Affinity from the moment it's submitted. The Vector Requests page lists every incoming request with its task list, the sequence requested, and the current workflow state. Triage the incoming requests, assigning them out to the appropriate team members, or marking as completed any that already exist. The connection back to the originating clone and the project it belongs to is preserved through every transition, so that when a downstream question arises about which clone produced which plasmid, the lineage answers it.
You design the vector
The first construct is an IgG against CD20. The vector needs the right heavy chain backbone, the variable domain from the clone, a CMV promoter, a signal sequence, and an antibiotic resistance gene for selection.
Affinity provides an in-browser sequence design widget integrated with your entire catalog of parts. The construct comes together as parts drop in from your catalog: signal sequences, constant regions, linkers, selection markers, terminators, or any other category you create. Each lands as an annotation on the growing sequence, reverse translated as needed for the ultimate expression host. When the design lands, registering it as a plasmid is one action; the new construct enters the bioregistry with its features persisted as annotations on the sequence, ready for cloning and expression. And a design doesn't have to start from scratch: import an existing plasmid and it opens as an editable map with its features intact, ready to modify or extend.
You work the construction through its phases
The plasmid is designed and registered. The bench work now spans amplification, transformation, and verification. Affinity's Vector Construction page is the working surface for the whole process. The build runs as a sequence of distinct steps, each tracked on its own: designing the constructs, then amplifying the insert, transforming it into bacteria, verifying the prep by sequencing, and aliquoting the result. Each step associates the constructs with the data a scientist records at that stage, so you can always tell what's waiting on a transformation, what's in verification, and what has failed.
The scientist picks the work up at amplification: the insert is synthesized or amplified at the bench, and the yield is captured per construct as it completes. Then it's transformed into competent bacteria, colonies are picked and grown up, and the prep is sequenced. At verification, those reads are aligned against the designed sequence, and the match, or the mismatch when it happens, is recorded against the request.
The request moves through each step as the work for that step is marked complete. Requests can be assigned to a specific scientist, postponed for later, or cancelled to remove them from the queue. The trail from request to verified plasmid stays intact through every transition.
The verified plasmid lands in the freezer
Sequencing has confirmed the prep matches the design. There's now a real tube of verified plasmid DNA, and the last step is getting it into the freezer and onto the books.
You aliquot the prep into storage: pick the freezer, shelf, rack, box, and position, and each aliquot becomes first-class record in inventory, ready to be pulled when expression starts. The plasmid's page now carries the full lineage: the circular sequence rendered as a vector map with features and signal sequences annotated, the design history showing the parts and the reference alignment used, the construction record with the amplification yield and the transformation's cell line, the originating discovery clone and the request that started the work, the project it belongs to, and the inventory location. The next time someone asks, where did this plasmid come from, and how was it verified?, the answer is one page.
