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TopThe first work on virtual laboratory comprised solely of texts and images of instruments, experiments, concepts, sites and people linked to experimentalization of life (“Dierig, Schmidgen & Dierig,”). Then it was also seen as a platform for discussing experimentation in the areas of life sciences, art and technology. In recent times, two main purpose of virtual laboratory development have been identified and pursued to date. These two areas are education and research. The examples of educational functions of virtual laboratories are (“ Handschuh,”):
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Learning and teaching of chemistry by presenting simulations of experiments.
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Physics presentations, such as structures and properties of molecules.
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Familiarizing with science, including genomics and techniques applied in biology and medicine, example. DNA microarray technology.
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Demonstration of statistic concepts and methods.
In science, virtual laboratories are becoming more popular, facilitating large-scale bioinformatics studies (“GenGrid,”; Susumu et al., 2005) and computational tasks, for example, drug discovery (Buyya, 2003), virology (“ViroLab,”), proteomics and mass spectrometry (“PubMed,”) and other disciplines. They also enable collaboration between real laboratories and companies (“PSNC VLAB,; AlmaGrid,”). Nowadays, due to technological breakthrough and automation of experimental procedures, virtual laboratories may not only collect, store and process data, but also perform some steps of experiments, providing access to expensive and specialized instruments (Afsarmanesh et al., 2000; Belloum et al., 2003; Hey & Trefethen, 2002). Such approach was applied to establish virtual laboratories connected with radio-telescope and NMR spectroscope (“PNSC-NMR,”).