Introduction to Sample Management

At its simplest level sample management is just inventory – where can one find a given item and retrieve it? But in the context of modern discovery efforts, be they drug discovery, agricultural, protein therapeutic, biobanking, or the plethora of other disciplines that collect and manage samples, the problem is far more complex. Today, sample management may have to manage millions of samples in a library that spans several continents but will also have to contend with a worldwide customer base. To make the problem more difficult the content of the samples must also be managed, which may involve complex chemical structures and storage conditions that may vary from room temperature under inert atmosphere to storage in liquid nitrogen. At this level the storage of these samples must now involve complex informatics and automation systems. This volume will capture the best practices compiled from experts in the field of sample management and will hopefully serve as a guide to both novice sample managers who need to track a few thousand compounds in room-temperature vials to professionals in multinational organizations. As long as there have been chemicals there has been a need for sample management. One could imagine that for a seventeenth century druggist this was simply an inventory of the herbal extracts and remedies he compounded into salves and potions and the location where they were stored. This could be done from memory in most cases and probably evolved to a written inventory when searching for needed components became too slow and cumbersome. Early sample management evolved in parallel with drug discovery. What we consider sample management today came into being as pharmaceutical companies began to amass chemical libraries and test these in disease-focused assays. As these companies synthesized compounds, they retained samples and began to amass collections of chemical compounds that numbered in the tens of thousands. At the same time, the testing of natural product extracts became common practice, significantly boosting the number of samples to be stored [1, 2]. As the number of samples exceeded 100 000 (at that time a seemingly immense number), automated systems were developed to store and catalog them. Initially, these were simple robotic units or adapted card file systems that would simply present entire drawers or boxes of samples to an operator. Chemical structures were often still paper copies and stored