Reduce bias and save time using Benchling Studies automated Randomization:

Before you can add animals to groups, you must first define the groups that will be used during your study. This can be done during study design or at any time during your study within the "Treatment groups" section.

You must also define the maximum number of animals to be assigned to each group.

To begin, select the animals to go through the randomization process. Studies offers exclusion criteria to automatically exclude animals with measurements at the extreme however, you cannot randomize animals to groups that are deceased or do not have any measurements recorded, so these must be removed from the selection. This can be done very easily using filters.

To select all animals in your study, click the check box at the top left of the animal table and use the link to "select 10+ animals" to expand the selection to the entire study.

With the animals selected, click the Bulk actions dropdown and choose Randomize to groups. 

Define the number of animals that you would like to randomize to each group. The capacity of each group is determined by the maximum value mentioned in the pre-conditions above.

To the right of the screen we display the total number of animals initially selected, the number of animals to be assigned and the number of animals to be excluded.

Click Next to proceed.

Studies will automatically exclude animals based on a metric selected by the user. To select this metric, click on the Exclude by dropdown menu at the top of the screen.

You will be presented with two box and whisker plots. The top plot displays a pre-exclusion overview and the bottom plot displays a post-exclusion overview.

By default, Studies uses the Auto mean setting. This is an optimal setting for excluding animals if you do not have a target value in mind.

Alternatively, you can deselect this option and define a Target mean. When this is entered, Studies will exclude animals whilst attempting to hit the target mean value with the remaining animals. This is a powerful feature if you have a large cohort with a large number of animals to be excluded. If you are excluding a small number of animals, it can be difficult to reach the target mean.

You can override both of these options and manually change the selection by scrolling to the bottom of the screen using the show animals button. As you add/remove animals, the plots and analytics will automatically update. If you make manual changes and would like to revert to Auto mean or Target mean, click the Undo Changes button in the blue banner.

In Benchling Studies there are two methods of Randomization that you can choose from:

Here you can select an attribute and the metrics you would like to randomize by. Clicking the Randomize button will update your results in the table below. For Clustered randomization you can click this button as many times as necessary to generate the optimum distribution.

Each of your study groups will be displayed with a breakdown of each animal to be assigned. Alongside each group, you can see the mean and either SD or SEM (depending on your treatment groups settings) for the metrics you selected as well as an ANOVA calculated P-value for comparing the means of the groups to greater confidence in these results

When you are happy with the groupings, click Finish to confirm.

You can distribute animals across groups according to Sex, Donor ID, or Date of birth. If more than one of these attributes are required for randomization, for example Sex and DOB, two separate randomizations will be required.

After Randomizing your animals you can leverage the automatic recaging tool accessible from the bulk actions menu in the animals table to move animals into cages based on their new group. You can also see the details of the Randomization in an autogenerated report found under Randomizations in the study overview section.