Jascha and the team at TH Wildau's Research Unit for Molecular Biology and Functional Genomics are evaluating Inkosi Bika LIMS with the goal to have an ISO 17025 compliant workflow for RT-PCR which is used for gene expression analysis in the unit's labs. The university's main interest is quality management and standardisation and a LIMS implementation would go some way towards this objective

Jascha is a bioinformaticist and is participating on the project for his M.Sc. Thesis, "Information management systems in the molecular biology lab: wikis and LIMS"

Asked about his motivation for writing the installer:

“I believe in FOSS, and co-operation. You build the system in South Africa, making it available for free. I'm in Germany and get to use it. The installer was tested by participants in Canada and the CICA crew in Costa Rica

This is a great experience for me and I wanted to give something back. The installer was the obvious thing to do. I had all the install notes, and simply made a shell script out of that. In the future we can modify the installer and stay up to date. It should make Bika more accessible and the more people use Bika, the better for all of us: a wider knowledge base, more people coding and giving back

Lots of labs need LIMS and they either can't afford it or they get stuck with a proprietary solution which can cost tons of money. I think if one can be more affordable than the competition it is a good thing, and what could be better in this regard than using Open Source, right?"

We could not have said it better. From the Bika team, and we are sure the bigger Bika OS LIMS community and many new implementers, a big thank you Jascha!

The installer can be downloaded from http://code.jascha.silbermann.name/bika-installer/

University of Applied Sciences Wildau on the Wikipedia