Redwood City, CA – The National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts (NAABB) has selected BioIT-award-winning CERF Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) software by Rescentris, a division of ELN Technologies, Inc., for NAABB’s data management, collaborative sharing, and intellectual property (IP) protection. NAABB also featured CERF as a panel topic at their recent annual meeting in Tempe, AZ. NAABB received $44 Million in Department of Energy funding to create the foundation for a sustainable biofuels industry.

NAABB is a biofuels renewable energy consortium of 30 organizations in academia, industry, and national labs including: Danforth Plant Science Center, Texas A&M, UO/Honeywell, Pratt and Whitney, Terrabon, Los Alamos National Laboratory, US Department of Agriculture, University of Pennsylvania and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This group combines expertise in algal biology, cultivation, harvesting, extraction, conversion, and energy economics analysis. A very ambitious agenda drove their decision to go paperless with an ELN to capture and organize their data, ideas, references, and best practices, manage document versioning, ensure rapid searchability and reuse of content, and facilitate information assembly for reporting and archiving.

According to NAABB Economics Director Meghan Starbuck, there were worries about ELNs being big, expensive, complex IT projects. However, “once requirements were clear, it was easy to select the Rescentris CERF system from the alternatives” because it was the only product compatible with their diversity of computers and users with true cross-platform support and ease of use.

NAABB implemented a single CERF server with workgroups and permissions configured to support the secure real-time sharing required for geographically distributed scientific teams while ensuring IP Protection for commercialization. NAABB Director William Tyrala said,

“A great challenge for us is to create and manage effective R&D collaborations. We needed an infrastructure and tools for centralized data management that enables researchers to share freely, but at the same time secures and protects sensitive intellectual property data. CERF helps us do this easily for all our notebook records and associated data.”

CERF is able to support the NAABB’s breadth of activities and workflows. CERF system administrator Jeremy Tate said, “The flexibility we have with CERF is crucial to the success of our research” and that it has been easy to manage, with no surprises. At their annual meeting in Tempe, AZ, NAABB hailed their success using CERF to stay on budget and on time.

About Rescentris

Rescentris, a division of ELN Technologies, Inc. provides CERF enterprise software to help organizations protect their R&D investments and increase collaboration and efficiency. The company serves a global base of commercial, academic, government and nonprofit research labs in biology and multidiscipline research areas. CERF combines Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) and scientific content management for a complete paperless lab information and recordkeeping solution. See http://www.rescentris.com.