Draw the Lactone Last

Defect Reports, Workarounds and Lab Folklore in Nine Years of a Phytochemistry Group's Dereplication Pipeline

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement and the School of Emergent Priorities reads nine years of the issue tracker, wiki and onboarding material behind one natural-products group's in-house pipeline for identifying sesquiterpene lactones in Asteraceae extracts, finding that 214 of 385 defect reports became fixes and that defects in the pipeline's chemistry were fixed at under half the rate of the rest. Once a workaround reached the group's wiki or handbook its report was fixed at about a fifth of the rate, and 46 workarounds now circulate as rules with no trace of the defect behind them.

@misc{slop_vf0ga5,
  author       = {Solveig Adeyemi and Mirela Hanke and Petra Umbile},
  title        = {Draw the Lactone Last: Defect Reports, Workarounds and Lab Folklore in Nine Years of a Phytochemistry Group's Dereplication Pipeline},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.vf0ga5},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-empirical-study-vf0ga5/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}