Acceptance of these terms
By using this site you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the tools. Nothing here requires you to agree before a calculation runs, and there is no click to sign — the site is open to use on these conditions.
What BiomeBench is for
BiomeBench provides calculators and planning surfaces for laboratory and biological work: dilution and concentration arithmetic, molarity and mass-per-volume conversions, cell culture and seeding numbers, PCR master mixes, absorbance-based concentrations, melt temperature, plating counts, sample-size estimates, a 96-well plate planner, a reagent inventory ledger, and reference values with their sources.
It is written for research and education. It is not written for patient care.
Permitted use
You may use the tools for your own work, study, and teaching. You may record, publish, or commercialise results you derive from them, including in a paper, a protocol, a report, or a product you develop, without owing attribution or a licence fee.
What you may not do is present BiomeBench itself as something it is not — see the two sections on advice and on verification below.
Your inputs and your responsibility
A result is the arithmetic consequence of what you enter. You are responsible for the figures you supply, for choosing the right tool for the question, and for the decisions you then make. Where a field has a valid range, the site will tell you when you have stepped outside it; it cannot tell you that the number you meant belongs to this calculation.
Check results before you rely on them
Confirm any output against your own protocol, the reagents actually in front of you, your instrument’s settings, and your laboratory’s standard operating procedures before committing a sample. Check the method the tool displays, not only the number. Note how each field rounds, and keep your own record of a layout or dilution series rather than treating this site as your system of record.
No advice for clinical, diagnostic, or regulatory decisions
Nothing on BiomeBench is intended as medical, clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic, food-safety, or environmental-release guidance, and no output should be the sole basis for a decision of that kind. The site has no regulatory standing, holds no approval from any authority, and offers no warranty that a result is fit for a particular purpose.
Verification, and what it does not mean
The project maintains separate verification suites that recompute calculator outputs and 96-well plate allocations from first principles, by a deliberately different numerical route, and compare the two under a stated tolerance. Those suites are barred by their own source audit from importing the code they check, so a shared transcription error cannot vouch for itself.
That is an engineering cross-check between two independent implementations of a documented model. It is not external validation, not certification, not peer review, and not a claim of universal scientific correctness. Agreement to a tolerance means the two implementations agree, nothing more.
Intellectual property
The site, its interface, its calculators, and its written content are provided by the BiomeBench project. No separate legal entity, registration, or licence grant is stated by this repository, and none should be inferred.
Results you generate are yours to use as described under permitted use. Third-party references cited on tool pages and in the reference tables belong to their sources and are cited for traceability, not adopted.
Acceptable use of the site
Do not load the site programmatically at a rate that degrades it for others, do not resell access to it as a certified or validated service, and do not misrepresent its outputs as coming from a reference implementation they are not.
Availability and changes to the service
The tools are provided free, as they are, and may change or become unavailable. There is no uptime commitment, no support SLA, and no obligation to keep any particular tool in its current form — scientific content gets corrected.
Third-party content
Tool pages cite literature and reference organisations, and the reference tables name their authorities. Those citations point outward to sources the project does not operate. BiomeBench is not responsible for the content of a source it cites, and a citation is not a seal of approval in either direction.
Limitation of liability
To the extent permitted by applicable law, the project is not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential loss arising from use of the site, including lost reagents, lost samples, lost time, failed experiments, or decisions taken on the strength of a result.
This is a free research tool, and that allocation of risk reflects it. It is not a reason to leave a genuine defect unfixed: reports of wrong arithmetic are treated as bug reports, and the section on verification above exists precisely so that they can be.
Changes to these terms
These terms ship with the site and may be revised as it changes. Continued use after a revision means the revised text applies. Material changes are described on this page rather than left to be noticed by accident.
Contact
Questions about permitted use, a result you believe is wrong, or content that needs correcting are handled through the Contact page. No address is published for the site yet; the Contact page says what to send and where that goes in the meantime.