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 creation or at any time during your study within the Treatment Groups section.

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

From the animals table in your study select the animal to be randomized:

Note: Animals must have measurements recorded and must be alive to be randomized, use filters and table sorting to select animals that meet the following criteria:

All selected animals:

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.

Benchling 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, Benchling 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, Benchling 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. 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.

Here you can select an attribute and the metrics you would like to randomize by. We have initially included Sex and Donor ID as available attributes.

Clicking the Randomize button will update your results in the table below.

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 SD for the metrics you selected.

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