- What is a linked experiment?
- How to manually link and unlink experiment
- Linked experiments in the Experiment Manager
What is a linked experiment?
Linked experiments are experiments and advanced analyses that are related to each other in a hierarchy of parents, siblings, and descendants. Linkages are illustrated in an interactive tree diagram from the Experiment Summary page, under the section, “Linked experiments”. The open experiment is indicated by the shaded blue box. You can click on any of the other experiment names in the tree to navigate to that experiment. The total size of all linked experiments is shown on the bottom left.
In the example above, the Experiment Summary for My experiment is shown. The Linked experiments section shows a tree diagram illustrating the relationship between My experiment and experiments that were automatically linked as siblings by being advanced analyses (FlowSOM, SPADE, viSNE in this example), or a linked clone (My experiment (Linked clone)), which are all on the row below My experiment.
FlowSOM was cloned to generate FlowSOM (Linked clone), one row below FlowSOM. A FlowSOM analysis was performed on My experiment (Linked clone) to generate FlowSOM on Linked clone. (Note: these advanced analyses and experiment names were all user-selected.)
Unlinked clones will not be displayed from the summary page of the parent experiment. However, the parent experiment will be shown on the Experiment summary page of the unlinked clone, as shown below. In this example My experiment (unlinked clone) is open. It was generated as an unlinked clone of My experiment, as indicated by the dashed arrow.
How to manually link and unlink experiment
In addition to experiments being automatically linked by being a linked clone or advanced analysis, experiments can be manually linked or unlinked. In an open experiment that does not have a parent, navigate to Actions > Link to Parent and choose a parent experiment from the dropdown menu. To change the parent experiment, click Actions > Edit linked parent and choose to either Unlink parent or choose a new parent experiment from the dropdown menu.
Members of an experiment family must have the same Primary Investigator, Primary Researcher, and Project associations. This also comes into play when linking experiment. If you select a parent experiment that has different ownership attributes, you will get a warning message: “Linking '[Selected Experiment]' as the parent of this experiment will make it so the following attributes will be set to be the same as the parent experiment: primary researcher, principal investigator, and project membership.” Click “okay,” if this is acceptable for your experiment.
Linked experiments in the Experiment Manager
Linked descendant experiments are hidden by default in the Experiment Manager, indicated by the “Group linked,” checkbox.
To unhide linked experiments and display them each on their own row, uncheck “Group linked.” Then, linked experiments will be displayed and denoted as linked by the link icon to the left of the linked experiment name, as shown below. Note, the color of the link symbol indicates if it is a clone or manually linked experiment (blue) or advanced analysis (purple).
Hovering your mouse over the link icon will pop up a hover tip indicating which experiment is linked. (Tip: toggling on Experiment IDs to be shown in the Experiment Manager under the Settings menu will make the ID column appear if it is hidden.)
For more details see Overview of the Experiment Manager
The behavior of linked experiments during: