eLabFTW integration with Charlie: AI at the service of your lab notebook

Scientific documentation is at the heart of modern research, but it also represents a major challenge for researchers. Between keeping a rigorous laboratory notebook and analyzing existing literature, the time spent on these administrative tasks can quickly encroach on the actual research work.

It is in this context that Emerit Science announces the integration of Charlie, its scientific AI agent, with eLabFTW, the most popular open-source electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) in Europe. This integration promises to revolutionize the way researchers document, analyze, and leverage their experiments.

eLabFTW (electronic Lab notebook For The World) is a free and open source electronic lab notebook, developed under the AGPLv3 license. Launched in 2012, it is now used by hundreds of laboratories around the world, from biotechnology startups to public research institutes.

The tool combines several essential features:

• Electronic lab notebook: Recording experiments with timestamps, digital signatures, and compliance with scientific traceability standards
• Inventory management: Tracking resources (chemical compounds, plasmids, antibodies, cell lines)
• Reservation system: Planning the sharing of equipment and resources between teams
• Granular permissions: Precise control over who can view or edit content
• Multi-format export: PDF, ZIP, CSV, JSON, and standardized ELN format

Integration between Charlie and eLabFTW is seamless via eLabFTW's RESTful API. Charlie can access your experiments, protocols, and data directly from your eLabFTW instance, while respecting the permissions you have configured.

Here are the key features of this integration:

When you document a new experiment in eLabFTW, Charlie can automatically:

• Search for relevant literature onPubMed and PubMed Central
• Identify patents related to your protocol on Espacenet
• Suggest related articles and alternative methodologies
• Add formatted bibliographic references directly to your eLabFTW entry

This feature transforms your lab notebook into an active scientific monitoring tool that automatically contextualizes each experiment within the state of the art.

Charlie can analyze your experimental results and help you:

• Interpreting data: Identifying trends, anomalies, or patterns in your results
• Compare with the literature: Compare your observations with what has been published.
• Propose follow-up experiments: Suggest controls or experimental variations based on your results.
• Generate summaries: Automatically create summaries of your experiences for reports or publications.

Finding a specific experiment in years of archives can be time-consuming. With Charlie, you can search your lab notebook using natural language:

Charlie understands the scientific context of your queries and can cross-reference information from multiple experiments to provide you with an overview.

Context: A doctoral student in molecular biology documents a series of quantitative PCR failures in eLabFTW.

Charlie's action:

• Analyzes documented experimental conditions (temperatures, concentrations, primers)
• Search PubMed for recent articles on common qPCR problems.
• Identifies a publication suggesting a modification of the hybridization temperature for GC-rich sequences.
• Automatically suggest this change in the eLabFTW entry with the associated reference

Result: Several days saved on troubleshooting and immediate access to published best practices.

Context: A postdoctoral researcher must write the Materials and Methods section of a scientific article.

Charlie's action:

• Retrieve all experiences related to the project from eLabFTW
• Identifies the protocols and methodologies used
• Generates a first draft of the Materials and Methods section in academic format.
• Add references for kits, reagents, and equipment used

Result: Reduction in drafting time from several hours to a few minutes, with complete and traceable documentation.

Context: A CNRS laboratory wishes to file a patent for a new protein purification technique.

Charlie's action:

• Analyzes experiences in developing the technique in eLabFTW
• Search Espacenet for existing patents covering similar methods
• Identifies elements that are new compared to prior art
• Generates a patent monitoring report to accompany the application file

Result: Rapid assessment of the patent landscape and solid preparation of the intellectual property file.

One of the major advantages of this integration is the digital sovereignty it guarantees. Unlike American solutions that transfer your data outside the European Union, the eLabFTW x Charlie integration is fully GDPR compliant:

• eLabFTW is self-hosted on your own servers or on European infrastructure (via Deltablot).
• Charlie is hosted in France, by a European cloud provider
• No data transfer to the United States or outside the EU
• Full compliance with the requirements of French public institutions (CNRS, INSERM, universities)

Setting up the eLabFTW x Charlie integration is simple and requires no advanced technical skills:

Step 1: Generate a key API in eLabFTW

In your eLabFTW instance, go to your user profile and generate a new key API. This key will allow Charlie to access your experiments in accordance with your permissions.

Step 2: Configure the integration in Charlie

In the Charlie interface, add your eLabFTW instance by providing:

• The URL of your eLabFTW instance (e.g., https://lab.example.com)
• Your keyAPI

Step 3: Set your preferences

Select the features you want to enable:

• Automatic enrichment of experiences
• On-demand results analysis
• Conversational search in the lab notebook

Considerable time savings

Documentation, bibliographic monitoring, and results analysis tasks can account for up to 30% of a researcher's working time. With the integration of eLabFTW x Charlie, this time is significantly reduced, allowing researchers to focus on experimentation and innovation.

Improved quality and traceability

Automatic contextualization of experiments and the addition of relevant references enrich your lab notebook. Each experiment becomes a complete, traceable, and referenced scientific document.

Facilitating collaboration

Charlie's summaries enable team members to quickly understand a project's history, even if they weren't involved in the initial experiments. Knowledge transfer is accelerated.

Simplified preparation of publications

The automatic generation of Materials and Methods sections, experiment summaries, and bibliographic reference lists significantly speeds up the writing of scientific articles.

The eLabFTW x Charlie integration is just the beginning. Emerit Science is actively working on new features:

• Predictive analytics: Suggest follow-up experiences based on machine learning from your past results
• Integration with other tools: Connection with GraphPad Prism, ImageJ, and other data analysis software
• Smart templates: Automatic generation of optimized protocols based on recent literature
• Anomaly detection: Automatic identification of results that are abnormal or require special attention

The integration between eLabFTW and Charlie illustrates a vision of scientific research where artificial intelligence does not replace the researcher, but assists them in their most time-consuming tasks. By combining the rigor of electronic documentation with the analytical power of AI, this integration paves the way for more efficient, better documented, and more collaborative research.

For European laboratories concerned about their digital sovereignty and GDPR compliance, this 100% European solution represents a credible alternative to American offerings. The future of scientific research lies in open, sovereign, and intelligent tools.