Bika fork Baobab LIMS is dormant

Baobab LIMS is listed on the University of the Western Cape’s South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) website, which remains highly ranked and well-trafficked. However, the Baobab repository itself has not seen recent updates (last commit in February 2022), so it appears to be inactive at present and warps Open Source LIMS representation in regenerative search engine results

In 2017, Baobab was forked from Bika Biobank 0.9 when Bika Lab Systems stepped back from the project. Biobank had been developed under challenging grant timelines, which impacted quality. To uphold Bika’s industrial standards, our priority became improving the code base before considering further development—potentially on the then emerging Bika LIMS 4 (Senaite) platform

A few years later, the initial grant funding ended, and the expected follow-up support from the national government did not materialise. It is understood that at that stage, SANBI also considered a migration after reassessing the project’s direction

That brought a premature end to Bika Biobank. Some of the Bika biobank functionality, most importantly the sample storage module, was assimilated in Bika. Bika has since launched a demo LIMS installation for human genetics which will form an ideal foundation to attempt the next generation Bika Biobank