Managing Sample Types

On Flow.bio samples can have "types" that broadly describe the experimental method used to generate them. This can then be used by pipelines to filter the sample types that can use the pipeline. For example, admins can specify that samples with the ChIP-Seq type can't be run through the RNA-Seq pipeline.

Sample types are important for two reasons:

1. This is another way of adding guardrails to the platform for inexperienced users, along with other Flow.bio features, such as restricting genome inputs to pipelines based on the sample "organism" metadata.

2. Sample types have admin-defined metadata attributes, which allow admins to manage their Flow.bio database.

Sample types are edited and managed through the "Types" tab of the Admin Panel. Here new sample types can be added and metadata associated with these sample types can be defined.

Learn more about sample types and specifying metadata attributes here