ARS-Media for Excel: A Spreadsheet Tool for Calculating Media Recipes Based on Ion-Specific Constraints

Abstract

ARS-Media for Excel is an ion solution calculator that uses “Microsoft Excel” to generate recipes of salts for complex ion mixtures specified by the user. Generating salt combinations (recipes) that result in pre-specified target ion values is a linear programming problem. Excel’s Solver add-on solves the linear programming equation to generate a recipe. Calculating a mixture of salts to generate exact solutions of complex ionic mixtures is required for at least 2 types of problems– 1) formulating relevant ecological/biological ionic solutions such as those from a specific lake, soil, cell, tissue, or organ and, 2) designing ion confounding-free experiments to determine ion-specific effects where ions are treated as statistical factors. Using ARS-Media for Excel to solve these two problems is illustrated by 1) exactly reconstructing a soil solution representative of a loamy agricultural soil and, 2) constructing an ion-based experiment to determine the effects of substituting Na+ for K+ on the growth of a Valencia sweet orange nonembryogenic cell line.

Developing BIOTEL: A Semi-Automated Spreadsheet for Estimating Telomere Length and Biological Age

“…Several spreadsheets have been developed in behavioral science and the research field of medicine and biology (Dubuque, 2015; Theodorsson, 2015; Carden et al, 2017; Deochand, 2017). Indeed, spreadsheets used in genomics and bioinformatics research have been generated through EXCEL (Fredriksson et al, 2014; Niedz, 2016). However, there have been several reports of false gene identification associated with the utilization of specific spreadsheets (Zeeberg et al, 2004).…”