Guideline of Sample names

When you submit the samples to the core facility, we require an excel table for the sample names, groups, concentration, or any other information available. Each person or each lab may have various ways in their naming system, however, we want to suggest some principles which can accelerate the down-steam analysis easily.

  • Sample name should be meaningful, but not overwhelming. An understandable word is better than meaningless letter. But it also shouldn’t become a sentence.
    • Patient_01 is better than P01
    • Control_01 is better than C01
  • Sample name don’t begin with number or sign (190i, #22p… etc) because some programs have issues in reading it automatically. Manual adjustment wastes our time which is also your time.
  • Use underline instead of space. Also no &%#$?!…
  • Highly recommended to have Group_Sample_Replicate structure. The number of labels in each sample should be the same across all samples. This makes your experimental design self-explanatory and avoid misunderstanding. For example:
    • Patient_01
    • Patient_02
    • Control_01
    • Control_02
  • or with one more layer:
    • IPS_D1_s1
    • IPS_D1_s2
    • IPS_D4_s1
    • IPS_D4_s2
    • EPI_D1_s1
    • EPI_D1_s2
    • EPI_D4_s1
    • EPI_D4_s2
  • It is great to have a consistent structure across the samples. Below is a bad example:
    • Patient_1
    • Patient_2
    • Control
    • Control (if the controls are different individuals, they should have a unique name by adding 1 and 2)

If we get these right in the very beginning, we can have consistent terminology all the time which will ease the communication and the analysis a lot. Thank you!!