Running the lab

Inventory

Supplies, reagents and equipment — with structures drawn automatically.

Import what you already keep in a spreadsheet and it works immediately; there is no schema to design first. Search across it, attach files to a record, export back out to xlsx, and share the whole inventory with your team.

Any column called SMILES, Structure, InChI or InChIKey renders the molecule above the text — no new column type, no migration. An existing chemicals list lights up the moment you import it.

Ask ARC to look something up or make a change — "we are out of the 2 mM stock", "move everything in freezer B shelf 3 to shelf 4" — and it edits the records directly, routed through the same sync and activity trail as your own edits.

Animal colonies

Animals, cages and breeding — matings, litters, weaning, archiving.

A colony manager for animal research: track individual animals and cages, set up matings, record and wean litters, archive animals when they leave the study. An overview dashboard shows the state of the colony, and an activity trail records who changed what.

Genotype-due and maximum-age flags are computed against the correct date rather than drifting with the clock, so the flags and nudges you rely on fire consistently.

Colonies sync per entity, so two people editing different parts of the same colony do not collide, and every change is attributed to the person who made it. ARC can add animals, move a cage or update genotypes on request through the same safe path.

Provenance

Every result traceable to its source — recorded as the work happens, not reconstructed afterwards.

A map of how your animals, samples, reagents, experiments and datasets connect. The important part is that ARC records lineage as it works: make a plot from a table and the link is captured with no prompting and no discipline required from you.

Browse it as a list or as a graph, click any entity to jump to where it actually lives, and generate a methods note with a provenance table straight from a record's lineage. Suggested links surface connections the agent believes exist but has not been told about.

This is the answer to the question every reviewer, auditor and future postdoc eventually asks: where did this number come from?

Scheduled tasks

Work that should happen on a cadence, with or without you.

Set a task to run on a schedule — a weekly QC sweep over new data, a monthly digest of what changed, a nightly check on an inbox folder. It runs in the project, writes its result to disk as a file, and posts a notification when it is done.

Schedules can be per project or across the workspace, and are listed together so you can see everything that is going to happen without opening each project.

The Activity board

Upcoming, Running, Needs you, Done — everything the agent is doing, on one board.

Every agent action becomes a card: background analyses, drafts, document reviews, scheduled runs, cloud jobs, even chat sessions. At a glance you can see what is in flight, what finished while you were away, and what wants your attention.

You stay in control from the board itself — cancel a run in progress, retry one that failed, open a finished result straight in the editor, or dismiss cards you are done with. Run agent launches a background task in any project, or across the whole workspace, without opening a project first.

Below the board sits a calmer Updates stream: recommendations, nudges and announcements, deliberately separated from the live work.

Shared with the team

An inventory or colony is a shared record, not a copy each.

Lab spaces can be shared with your team, with collaborators seeing the same records and the same activity trail. Renaming a shared inventory or colony renames it for everyone — the registry updates first, so collaborators and the mobile app see the new name rather than the old one.

If you are not on the owning team, Bench says so plainly instead of renaming only your local copy.