Frequently Asked Questions

BiomeBench is a collection of web-based calculation and planning tools for biology and laboratory science: thirteen published calculators covering dilutions, molarity, cell culture, PCR, absorbance-based concentration, plating counts and unit conversion, plus a 96-well plate planner, a reagent inventory ledger, and a set of cited reference tables.

It is written for people who work at a bench or plan work for one: research scientists, laboratory technicians, graduate and undergraduate students, and instructors preparing teaching laboratories. Every calculator states the relationship it uses so a user can check it against their own protocol.

Calculations fall into nine categories: dilution and concentration, molecular biology, DNA/RNA, protein, cell culture, unit conversion, laboratory practice, experimental planning, and reference data. The planner and inventory are workspaces rather than single calculations: they keep a plate layout and a stock ledger in your browser while you work.

Yes. Every tool on BiomeBench is free, with no paid tier, no usage quota, and no account required to reach any calculation.

No. BiomeBench has no sign-up, no login, and no user accounts of any kind. There is nothing to register, and no identity is required to use or return to any tool.

Your calculation inputs are processed in your browser and are not transmitted to a BiomeBench server. The site sets no cookies. Work you deliberately save — a planner layout, inventory entries, saved preparations, captured results — is written to your own browser's local storage under keys named biomebench-*, and the theme preference under bb-theme.

Clear site data for biomebench.com in your browser settings, or delete individual entries from within the planner and inventory. Because the data lives only on your device, removing it there removes it entirely; there is no server-side copy for us to delete on request.

No third-party analytics or advertising script is loaded on any page today. The site carries a small internal event bus that a provider could later be attached to; it is limited to two event names and a tool identifier, and it never includes a value you typed. BiomeBench sets no cookies. Requests to load the site's fonts do reach Google's font servers, and hosting request logs at the infrastructure level are outside this application's control. See the Privacy Policy for the full picture.

Each calculator implements a stated relationship rather than an opaque model, and the method, its assumptions and its limitations are shown on the tool page so you can confirm it matches your protocol. Beyond unit tests, the project maintains two verification suites that recompute calculator outputs and plate allocations from first principles by a deliberately independent numerical route and compare the two under an explicit tolerance. Agreement at that level is an engineering cross-check, not a claim that a number is correct for your assay.

Treat a result as the arithmetic consequence of the inputs you supplied. Before committing reagents or a sample, check the answer against your protocol, your instrument's settings, and the reagents actually in front of you, and note the rounding each field applies.

No. BiomeBench is for research and educational use. It does not provide clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic, or regulatory guidance, and no output should be used as the sole basis for a decision affecting patient care, food safety, or environmental release.

Yes, and this is what the planner is for: laying out a 96-well plate across samples, conditions, controls and replicates, running consistency checks against that layout, and exporting a portable record of it. If your laboratory operates under a validated-document workflow, keep the exported record alongside your own notebook rather than treating BiomeBench as your system of record.

Volume in litres, millilitres and microlitres; concentration in molar and its sub-multiples plus mass-per-volume forms; cell counts per millilitre and per well; mass in grams, milligrams and micrograms; temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit; and time from seconds to days. Where a field accepts more than one unit, the available options are shown beside the field.

Yes. The planner works on the canonical 96-well grid (rows A–H, columns 1–12), supports whole-row, whole-column and rectangular range fills for repeated patterns, flags volume and spatial-consistency problems as you build a layout, and exports the result. A dedicated plate-normalization calculator handles seeding density across a whole plate.

A calculator answers one question and stays stateless. The workflow tools hold the shape of an experiment: a calculation result can be captured into the current experiment context and reused as an input elsewhere, so a dilution you have already worked out does not have to be retyped into the plate layout. The inventory closes the loop by tracking whether the reagents the plan assumes are actually in stock.

Tell us. The most useful report names the tool, gives the exact inputs and units you entered, states the output you received, and states the value you expected with the calculation behind it. The Contact page has a template for this. Suspected calculation errors are treated as defects to fix, not as user error.