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Project

In CellRepo, a project is used to group related biological work under a shared context.

Most users can think of a project as representing: - a research question - a study or experiment series - a product or development effort - a grant, paper, or internal initiative

Projects help you organise work.
They do not directly track biological changes themselves.

What a project is (in practice)

A project provides the context in which biological assets exist.

For example, a project called:

Lactate production optimisation in E. coli

might include: - several engineered strains - multiple plasmid designs - optimisation attempts carried out over time

Each of these assets is tracked separately using repositories, but they all live under the same project.

(If you haven’t created a project yet, see
Create your first project.)

What a project is not

A project is not: - a single strain - a construct - a sequence file - a versioned biological entity

Those are handled by repositories.

If you find yourself wanting to record changes over time, you are likely thinking about a repository, not a project.

(See Repository for more details.)

How projects and repositories work together

A simple way to think about it:

  • Project → Why are we doing this work?
  • Repository → What biological asset are we tracking?
  • Commit → What changed, and when?

Projects group work.
Repositories track assets.
Commits record change.

How many projects should you create?

There is no single “correct” number.

Many users choose to: - create one project per study or research question - create separate projects for unrelated work - keep early exploration in one project and split later if needed

Projects can be created, renamed, or archived as your work evolves.

Project ownership and visibility

Projects belong either to: - an individual user, or - an organisation or lab

This depends on how you set things up initially.

Ownership affects: - who can see the project - who can create repositories within it - who can collaborate

You do not need to configure all of this when creating a project.
Defaults are usually sufficient at the beginning.

(For more detail, see
Visibility and access.)

A realistic example

Organisation: NovaSyn Bio Lab
Project: Lactate production optimisation in E. coli

Within this project, you might have repositories such as: - ΔldhA knockout strain (E. coli MG1655) - Plasmid pLAC-OPT-v1 - Parental MG1655 strain

Each repository has its own history, while the project keeps them connected.

If you’re unsure how to structure your work

It’s normal to hesitate when deciding how to split work into projects.

If you’re unsure: - start with fewer projects - keep related work together - adjust structure later once patterns emerge

CellRepo is designed to support change without losing history.

Getting help

If you’re unsure whether something should be a separate project, or how to organise work across projects, you don’t need to guess.

You can contact us at
📧 support@cellrepo.com

We’re happy to help you map CellRepo concepts to your real lab workflow.