Cultures

The Cultures section is your lab’s master inventory. Every agar plate, liquid culture, and ultimately every fruiting block traces back to a culture record. Keeping this list accurate gives you full lineage from spore to harvest.

Viewing your cultures

Navigate to Lab > Cultures to see a paginated table of all cultures. Each row shows:

• Name — your internal identifier for the culture
• Species — scientific name (e.g. Hericium erinaceus)
• Strain — the cultivar name within that species
• Source — how this culture was obtained
• Generation — how many propagation steps from the original material
• Status — current health/availability state

Click any row or the name link to open the culture detail page.

Creating a culture

Click New Culture in the top right to register a new culture. Required fields are marked with an asterisk.

Required fields

Species and Strain are free text. As you type, the form suggests the spellings your lab already uses (from your species list and your existing cultures and strains), so the same strain is not entered three different ways. A new culture starts as Active; you change its status later from the detail page.

Source types

• Tissue sample — isolated from fresh fruiting body tissue
• Spore print or syringe — grown from a spore print or spore syringe
• Purchased culture — received from a supplier or culture bank
• Transfer from another culture — transferred from another culture in your library
• Other… — type your own, for a source that is not on the list

A Manager can add the lab’s own sources under Settings → Enumerables → Culture sources. Those appear at the top of the list.

Parent and generation

Parent is optional and defaults to No parent — start a new line. Use that for a fresh tissue or spore isolation, or a purchased culture: the culture becomes the root of its own line.

If the culture came from something already in your lab, pick it from the Parent list. The list shows your cultures, agar plates and liquid cultures by name, with species and generation (for example “Lions Mane Isolation A · Hericium erinaceus Mane Event · G0”). Contaminated and discarded items are left out. Used-up items stay in the list, under Cultures — no longer on hand, because a used-up vial still carries the genetics; picking one shows “Marked used up; you can still start a line from it.” You can also scan the parent’s label to pick it.

Generation only appears when there is no parent. Leave it at 0 for a fresh isolation. When you choose a parent, the generation is set for you as the parent’s generation + 1.

Optional fields

After saving, you land on the culture detail page.

Culture detail

The detail page shows all metadata in a structured layout:

• Basic Information — species, strain, source, generation, status, storage method, storage location, and timestamps. Source and storage method show in words (“Tissue sample”, “Cryo (frozen)”), including your lab’s own.
• Made from — the culture, plate or liquid culture it came from, by name, species, strain and generation (for example “Vial-011924-HECNS-3 · Hericium erinaceus · Lions Maine · G0”). Click it to open that item.
• Status — change the status (Managers and Owners).
• Make from this culture — start a plate, liquid culture or culture with this one already chosen as the parent.
• Notes — any free-text notes attached to the record

Editing a culture

Click Edit on the detail page to correct the name, species, strain, source, source details, storage method, storage location or notes, for example to fix a misspelled species. Only the fields you change are saved. Generation and parent can’t be edited; they come from the culture’s line.

Fixing a spelling here also fixes the suggestions on the New Culture form, since those come from your existing cultures.

Printing a label

Click Print label to print a small PDF tag with the culture’s name, species, strain,, generation, date and a QR code. A small dialog opens with Tag size: 2x1 inch, 4x2 inch, or a Letter sheet, for this print only (it doesn’t change the stock your block labels use). It starts at 2x1, or at 4x2 if that is the PDF stock you chose for block labels; a Letter or 4x6 choice made for block labels never becomes the lab default. Click Print and the tag opens in a new tab for printing on a ROLLO or any other printer; the message that follows names the size. If your browser blocks the new tab, the dialog stays open with an Open label link. If the label can’t be made, the reason is shown in the dialog.

Status values

Update the status on a culture whenever its condition changes: pick the new status under Status on the detail page and click Save status. This keeps your downstream plate and liquid culture work traceable back to healthy stock.

• Contaminated asks what you saw. Your contamination setting (Settings > Configuration > Lifecycle, under Lab items) then decides what happens: the culture is either flagged and kept for watching, or ended. Either way a contamination badge shows on the page, and Make from this culture is replaced by a note to start from a clean item.
• A Depleted (used up) culture shows “Marked used up; you can still start a line from it.” and still offers Make from this culture, so you can record the plate you made from the last of a vial.
• Bringing an archived, depleted or contaminated culture back to Active counts toward your plan’s active lab items; if you are at the limit, the page says so.

Deleting a culture

Open the culture detail page and click Delete. You will be asked to confirm. Deletion is permanent and removes the culture from your library. Associated plates and liquid cultures are not deleted — their parent reference remains intact for lineage history.

Lineage

Every culture tracks its parent. When you create a culture from another culture, agar plate or liquid culture, pick that item in the Parent list on the New Culture form (or use New culture from this… on its detail page, which opens the form with the parent already chosen). The generation goes up by one and the new culture joins its parent’s line, so you can trace any descendant back to its origin. A culture with no parent starts a new line of its own.

To visualize the full ancestry and descendant tree for a culture, go to the culture detail page on the mobile app, or use the lineage API endpoint: GET /lineage/culture/{id}.

Role requirements