qslib

Introduction

QSLib is a package for interacting with Applied Biosystems’ QuantStudio qPCR machines, intended for non-qPCR uses, such as DNA computing and molecular programming systems.

There are a few different ways to use QSLib:

  • Through its command-line script, qslib, which has a number of subcommands allowing basic machine control, experiment file information, and data export.

  • As a library in Python, often either in the REPL, or via a notebook system like Jupyter. QSLib uses nest-asyncio to allow it to operate seamlessly within Jupyter notebooks. This allows experiment creation, modification, and processing, data plotting, machine control, and all other features. Machine communication, however, does require some setup.

  • As a monitoring system integrated with Matrix and InfluxDB. This allows real-time storage of machine and run state and fluorescence data, and almost-live synchronization of in-progress and finished experiment files (in-progress files may not be usable by AB’s software).

Basic use within Python

Basic of QSLib is mostly built around the Experiment and Machine classes, along with several classes for defining a PlateSetup and temperature Protocol.

By default (as of v0.5.0), most methods communicating with a machine are “automatic”: they handle connection and disconnection, and access levels, automatically. They are also written so that, if there is no passsword required, the machine’s hostname as a string can be used as a reference to the machine. So, for example, if you want to run an experiment experiment on machine example-qs5, you could use: experiment.run("example-qs5"), or, to load an experiment named my-experiment from a machine, you could use experiment = Experiment.from_machine("example-qs5", "my-experiment"). Similarly, to open the machine’s drawer, you could use Machine("example-qs5").drawer_open().

Documention contents

Indices and tables