Culsma: A Formal Language for Laboratory Protocols
Laboratory protocols are commonly communicated in natural language, leaving room for variation in how experimental commitments are understood and carried out. We present Culsma, an executable specification language in which protocols are written as programs. The same program is legible to bench scientists and directly machine-readable by software that checks and runs it. It serves as the protocol's operational specification, making experimental commitments explicit for checking before execution and retaining them in results. Culsma addresses how experimental procedures are modeled: it defines operations by the experimental changes and relationships they establish, giving a fine-grained, compositional basis whose technique- and device-specific realizations remain extensible. We examine this boundary in workflows spanning molecular and cell biology, protein biochemistry, and immunoassays, which combine material handling, separation, and measurement differently, asking which distinctions the operation interface preserves. A maintained, source-linked benchmark broadens this evaluation with versioned checks of source-step correspondence and software execution.