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One stable fingerprint for your experiment.

Olto distills a protocol to its canonical experimental form and content-addresses it into a single id. The same experiment normally produces the same fingerprint even when the wording differs, deterministically and recomputably. The fingerprint, comparison and capsule tools run on your device (the optional “Find duplicates” search sends your text to Olto to scan the public library). Paste a protocol and watch.

Paste a protocol or methods section

Cell culture and maintenance. HeLa cells (ATCC) were maintained in Dulbecco’s Modified Eagle Medium (DMEM) supplemented with 10% heat-inactivated fetal bovine serum (FBS) and 1% penicillin/streptomycin in a humidified incubator held at 37 °C under 5% CO2. Cells were passaged every two to three days upon reaching approximately 80% confluence and were confirmed to be free of mycoplasma before use. For each experiment, cells were seeded at 200000 cells per well into 6-well plates and allowed to adhere overnight, then cultured to roughly 70% confluence before any treatment.

CRISPR-Cas9 knockout of TP53. To generate the TP53 knockout, cells at 70% confluence were transfected with 2.5 µg of a Cas9 expression plasmid together with 1 µg of a validated single-guide RNA (sgRNA) targeting exon 4 of TP53, using a standard lipofection reagent according to the manufacturer’s protocol. Following transfection, cells were returned to the incubator for 48 h to allow editing to proceed. Successful knockout was confirmed by western blot: cells were washed twice in ice-cold PBS, lysed in 200 µL of RIPA buffer containing protease inhibitors, and total protein was resolved by SDS-PAGE. Membranes were blocked in 5% BSA and probed overnight at 4 °C with an anti-p53 primary antibody, then washed and imaged; loss of the p53 band relative to the wild-type control confirmed knockout.

Apoptosis assay and controls. To measure the apoptotic response, edited and wild-type cells were treated with 10 µM cisplatin for 24 h to impose chemotherapeutic stress. Untreated cells and a vehicle-only control (an equivalent volume of DMSO) were included on every plate so that any observed effect could be attributed to the treatment rather than to handling. Each condition was performed in biological triplicate (n = 3) and the entire experiment was repeated three times on separate days to establish reproducibility. At the assay endpoint, cells were gently harvested, centrifuged at 500 ×g for 5 min, resuspended, stained with Annexin V and propidium iodide, and the apoptotic fraction was quantified by flow cytometry.

Statistics and reporting. Apoptotic fractions were compared between the knockout and wild-type groups using a two-tailed Student’s t-test, with significance defined a priori at p < 0.05. All results are reported as the mean ± SEM of three independent experiments. All procedures were carried out under BSL-2 containment with appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE), and the laboratory operates under an ISO 17025 quality-management framework.

Runs in your browser: this fingerprint is computed locally and nothing is uploaded.

Fingerprint

rpf_tx5km2r8s16knsmv8ec5gvb108

4.2×

Compressed

Entities

2,561→617

Chars → bytes

Quantities

10µM500xg0.001mg0.0025mg1%10%5%70%80%37°C4°C172800s300s86400s0.2mL

Techniques

assaycell-culturecentrifugationcrisprflow-cytometryincubationlysissds-pagestainingtransfectionwestern-blot

Materials

antibodybsabufferdmemdmsofbspbspenstrepsds

Statistics

t-test

Standards

ISO 17025

Design signals

controlsn=3sampleSizesafetystatistics

How it works

Middle-out, but for methods.

Three deterministic steps. No model, no randomness: the fingerprint is computed locally by a deterministic canonicalization.

Distill

Recognized quantities are normalized to SI (5 mL, 0.005 L and 5000 µL collapse to one token); techniques, materials, controls, statistics and cited standards are extracted, sorted and deduplicated.

Compress

The prose collapses to a compact canonical form in which the key extracted facts (quantities, techniques, materials, controls, statistics and standards) survive. A methods section of thousands of characters becomes a few hundred bytes.

Address

That canonical form is hashed into one stable id, rpf_…, which is the fingerprint. It is deterministic: recompute it on any machine with the same algorithm version and it matches.

The unit table is case-sensitive on purpose. In a methods section nM is a concentration and nm is a wavelength, so the two are read as different dimensions and never fold together.

Want the exact rules: the canonicalization grammar, the 128-bit hash, collisions and limits? Read the technical specification →

The fingerprint & the capsule

One is the id. The other rebuilds the whole thing.

A hash can't be reversed. A 26-character id could never hold a whole protocol, and anything claiming to “decompress” one is fiction. So Olto gives you a second artifact: a capsule that carries the protocol's title and sections losslessly and decodes anywhere, offline.

rpf_… · the fingerprint

A one-way identity

26 characters. Tiny, stable, and irreversible by design: you can't reconstruct a protocol from it. Ideal for citing, deduplicating, and detecting whether a method's canonical form has changed.

rpc1_… · the capsule

A lossless, portable copy

The protocol's title and sections, real-DEFLATE-compressed into one token. Paste it in an email; anyone decodes it back to the exact encoded protocol, offline, with no server or login, and it re-derives the fingerprint so a mismatch flags that the content changed. Try the Capsule tab above.

Why it matters

Why a fingerprint changes the game.

Reproducibility fails because methods live as unstructured prose that can’t be compared, verified, or tracked. A stable identity fixes that.

A verifiable identity

The fingerprint is a stable id for how an experiment is actually done, independent of wording. Cite it, and compare against it.

Tamper-evidence

A passport carries its fingerprint. Anyone can recompute it from the public protocol and compare, so a change to the experiment’s canonical form (its quantities, methods and controls) will change the fingerprint when recomputed.

“Has this been done before?”

Because identical experiments share a fingerprint and similar ones sit close in reproducibility distance, the Find duplicates tab scans Olto’s public library and surfaces duplicate and near-duplicate protocols that read completely differently.

What a fingerprint is not: it identifies a method's canonical form. It does not prove authorship, that the method is valid, or that the procedure was ever performed, and it is not a trusted timestamp.

Every protocol you write in Olto gets a fingerprint. Every one you publish gets a public passport.

Draft a detailed protocol, run it, and share a Reproducibility Passport (with a stable, citable permalink) that carries its fingerprint.

Try Olto Browse public passports