Support and FAQ

Our support is run by Marvin, our own paranoid android, who’s afflicted with severe depression and boredom, in part because he has a “brain the size of a planet” which he is seldom, if ever, given the chance to use.

If you can’t find your answer in the FAQ below, please ping Marvin through marvin@grit42.com – and he’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe you can help exercise his neurons and make him slightly happier?

The grit42 company

What does the 42 in your name mean?

The author Douglas Adams wrote “Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy” in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing it into a “trilogy” of five books! As part of the story a computer gives the answer to the “ultimate question for life the universe and everything” – and it’s 42! If you haven’t discovered the guide yet – and likely you haven’t as you ask the question – go explore. It’s great fun.

What does grit mean?

Within psychology grit is a positive trait. It signals passion for long term goals and perseverance. As data management is more a marathon than a sprint these are values we can relate to. It’s also a combination of “grid” and “it”. As we offer software (IT) as a hosted solution and hence customers can get up and running quickly – like getting power from the electricity grid – combining them into grit made sense.

What do you know about research data management?

A lot! The 4 founders of grit42 was the core parts of the internal Research Informatics department in a Danish Pharma company for 15 years. We also have a very diverse team with expertise from relevant different areas like Pharma, computer science, bioinformatics and mathematics.

Do you have any customers?

Yes! We have customers of very different sizes – from small biotech, over research institutions to middle size pharma companies – using different parts of the grit42 platform and apps.

General grit42 platform stuff

We are far away from Denmark. How will it perform here?

Our hosting partner has server farms in relevant parts of the world like New York, Frankfurt and Singapore to mention a few. We deploy our platform to the location that is nearest you and thereby reduce the latency as much as possible.

Looks cool – and dark! What about printing and screen shots?

Yes, we agree. It does look cool! And it’s great to look at and work with on the screen. But in meeting rooms with bad projectors it can be hard to read and the dark background is not good for printing. We therefore also have a “light” theme user can switch to if they prefer or when needed for meeting rooms and printing

We already have our own internal compound/structure database. Can we still use grit42?

Yes, certainly. We can either just link to the compound numbers in your database – but then you will not have structures and chemical awareness in our platform – or we can extract and import your structures into our platform.

We have a lot of historic data we would like to load into the platform as well. Is that doable?

Yes, that is doable. If you have structures in SD-files or in a database from where you can export SD-files you can bulk upload them from the front end via our SD-loader. If you have experimental results we will firstly need to create relevant setups and then the results can be added via drag/drop in the front end.

If it really is a lot of historic data stored in several different systems and formats we can talk about how we can help you.

Can we export the plots, curves etc for use in presentations?

Yes, the plots and curves can easily be exported as .png files (right click on the plots and then “save to png”) so you can copy them into slides for your presentations

We do not need all the features your platform seems to offer. Can we get a smaller part of it?

Yes! You can get the platform on it’s own as a data storage/management system and add the Apps you need for your workflows. The Growth Curves App can also be acquired as a stand alone App for support of your growth curve analysis. If you have question about this and what would make sense for you just ask.

What chemical engine (cartridge) do you use?

We use RDKit  developed and maintained by Greg Landrum et al.

Installation and deployment

Can we also get your platform installed on our own servers on premise?

The short answer is “Yes!”

The longer answer is that we can work with you – and your IT department – and install the platform on your own servers behind your company firewall. It clearly makes things more complicated but there can be many good (and bad!) reasons for doing so. This is therefore someting we offer and our DevOps guys has done a lot of work to make the process as painless as possible

What about integrations into our existing environment and systems?

We naturally understand that you might have existing systems and equipment that you would like to hook up to the grit42 platform. That’s fine! We have done it many times before, with many different types of equipment and in many different ways. So let’s talk.

What are the hard and software requirements?

We normally run our platform on Linux servers and use Postgresql for the data. We have also been working with Oracle for many years so that is also an option. But utilisation of Docker and other DevOps tricks both simplifies the deployment and loosens the requirements. Again, let’s talk.

Experiment app

Do you have other types of plots than the ones we can see here?

Certainly! We utilise a library for the the plots and visualisations. The library has tons of different kinds of visualisations we can add if/when the relevant data for them appears.

How does the plots get created?

The different experiment types has different relevant plots associated with them – meaning that as soon as you upload the data the platform will visualise the data for you in the pre-defined plots. The user can then add more plots – also of a different kind – if relevant.

Growth curves app

What kind af data files (equipment) does this app support?

Our growth curves app is developed together with one of the big pharma companies to support their internal data management of the output from the Omnilog machine from Biolog. Our application is general – not specific for Omnilog – displaying growth curves and AUC etc and will hence be able to support other similar machines when we update the import tool to accept other output file formats.

This looks very nice, but we do not have a Biolog machine. Can you help?

We expect so. If you have another type of equipment that also creates growth curves from plate based time series measurements then we should be able to help. Get in contact – send an email to Marvin – and tell us about it and pls do attach an example of the files you can get out of your equipment. Then we will see if we can apply some magic and upload your data so you can get a similar visualisation of them.

How do you calculate the AUC’s?

We have a collaboration with Markus Göker from DSMZ in Braunschweig who developed and still maintains the OPM package which we connect to in the background for the analysis of the growth curves. For a scientific introduction to OPM you should start with Vaas et al. 2013.

Animal handling app

Do you keep track of what animals are in what cage?

If you state how many animals you want per cage the application will divide the animals accordingly – ie the first 4 animals (id’s) in cage 1. If you later decide to stratify the animals and hence want to group them differently you just update/edit in the application.

How does the print cage card work?

Based on your group of animals, how they are divided into dosing groups and how many are in each cage the application creates the cage cards to match the situation and you then just print them out. The size of the cards can be configure so they directly fit the pocket of your cages. Hence, no more writing them by hand!