The TREC project collects thousands of samples (from soil, air, sediments, …) at various sites in Europe.

All collected samples are shipped to EMBL for long-term storage in freezers (-80C & -20C), nitrogen tanks (-180C) and a cold room (4C). These samples will be processed (wet & dry processing) by different teams within and outside EMBL. Upon reception, the samples and their storage location should be registered in the LabID (aka STOCKS) data management system using their unique barcode as the identification key.
To ensure full traceability, sample shipment to external partners (and/or local use of samples) should be reflected and recorded in the system.

All metadata (e.g. from log sheets) of the collected samples will be stored in the EBI BioSamples database using the same barcodes as accession numbers. This metadata will not initially be stored in LabID and should be retrieved from BioSamples.

The collected samples are recorded as a new Specimen type ‘TREC‘ and offers a few custom properties. The new TREC Specimen model is described in the TREC Specimen Model section below and the steps detailing how to register a batch of TREC Specimen upon reception are described in the TREC Specimen registration section

TREC Specimen are stored in e.g. (cryo)boxes, bottles, bags or other “containers” that are stored in freezers, cold room, cryotanks… which are all located in the 9A E-1 Bio Hub Storage. The detailed storage organization of the TREC Biobank is described in the Biobank Storage Organisation

Finally, the procedure to collect TREC specimen from the Biobank, either to ship them away or process them in a local lab, is implemented as a Shipment. The steps describing how to create a Shipment of one or many TREC specimen is detailed in the Shipping & Using TREC Specimen section

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