Chris Morris
CCP4, Daresbury Laboratory, Warrington WA4 4AD, UK
The PIMS project aims to produce a commercial-quality Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to meet the needs of structural biology laboratories.
The project, funded by the BBSRC-SPoRT initiative for 5 years, is for the incremental development and deployment of a LIMS, initially for use by the other BBSRC-funded SPoRT consortia: SSPF and MPSI, but to be freely available to the scientific community as a whole.
Designed with flexibility in mind, PIMS will be suitable for use in all academic environments ranging from the single, hypothesis driven laboratory to multi-site and automated high-throughput settings.
Version 0.4 of
Protein Information Management System was released on
PiMS 0.4 includes facilities to manage constructs. Thanks to Johan van Niekerk of the SSPF for this functionality, and also to Jon Diprose of the OPPF, as well as the PiMS developers. It also includes diagrammatic displays of target progress. It will be used by the Scottish Structural Proteomics Facility.
PiMS 0.3 already included facilities for managing targets. It is in use by the Membrane Protein Structure Initiative.
There is an online demonstration available at http://www.pims-lims.org:8080/pims0_4/index.htmlTo use this demo the username is demo, password is demo. Later on example data, courtesy of SSPF, will be added to it.
To install PIMS version 0.4 you just need to take the java WebArchive at http://www.pims-lims.org/pims0_4.war and follow the instructions from http://www.pims-lims.org/svn/pims/releases/V0_4_0/pims-servlet/dist/docs/README.txt
PIMS is available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).