Agar Plates

Agar plates are the intermediate step between your culture library and inoculation-ready liquid cultures. Sporeline tracks each plate as a distinct record linked to its parent culture or parent plate, giving you a chain of custody from isolation to production.

Viewing plates

Navigate to Lab > Agar Plates to see a paginated table of all plates. Each row shows:

• Label — your identifier for the plate (or a short ID if no label was set)
• Parent — the culture or plate this plate was transferred from, linked for quick navigation
• Generation — automatically calculated from the parent’s generation
• Media Type — the agar formulation used
• Status — current state of the plate
• Transfer Date — when the transfer was made

Click any row to open the plate detail page.

Creating a plate

Click New Plate to record a new agar plate transfer.

Required fields

A new plate starts as Colonizing; you update its status later from the detail page.

Parent (optional)

Parent defaults to No parent — start a new line. Leave it there for a plate that starts a line of its own, such as a plate from a purchased culture or a spore print you have not recorded as a culture.

If the plate was transferred from a culture or another plate in your lab, pick it from the Parent list. The list shows your cultures and agar plates by name, with species and generation; contaminated and discarded items are left out, and used-up items stay in under — no longer on hand. Picking one shows “Marked used up; you can still start a line from it.” There is nothing to type or paste.

You can also scan the parent’s label (a culture or plate label) while the form is open: it is selected in the list, which flashes green. The New plate from this… action on a culture or plate detail page opens this form with that parent already chosen.

The generation is set for you: parent generation + 1, or 0 for a plate with no parent.

When the parent is a cryo vial that is still active, Mark the vial used up appears. Tick it when you thawed the vial for this transfer: once the plates are saved, the vial is set to Depleted (used up). If the plates save but the vial can’t be marked, one message says so; change the vial’s status on its own page.

Media

The list starts with your lab’s own media (a Manager adds them under Settings → Enumerables → Agar media), followed by:

• Malt extract agar (MEA)
• Potato dextrose agar (PDA)
• Yeast malt agar (YMA)
• Other… — type the name of your own media

When you use your own media, a Media recipe field appears so you can describe the formulation.

Vessel

Petri plate (the default), Slant tube, Deep dish, your lab’s own vessels (Settings → Enumerables → Agar vessels), or Other….

Optional fields

Status values

Plate detail

The detail page is divided into sections:

Basic information

Shows label, generation, transfer date, vessel, media type, media recipe (if set), pour date, additives, and status. Vessel and media show in words, including your lab’s own.

Status

Managers and Owners change the plate’s status here and click Save status. Contaminated asks what you saw; your contamination setting (Settings > Configuration > Lifecycle, under Lab items) then either flags the plate and keeps it for watching, or ends it. Either way a contamination badge shows and Make from this plate is replaced by a note to start from a clean item. A Used plate shows “Marked used up; you can still start a line from it.” and still offers Make from this plate. Bringing a used, contaminated or discarded plate back counts toward your plan’s active lab items; if you are at the limit, the page says so.

Colonization

Appears when at least one of these fields has data:

• Colonization % — estimated percentage of the plate covered by mycelium
• Purity Assessment — your assessment of culture purity
• Visual Notes — free-text observations about growth pattern, color, texture, or anomalies

Parent

The parent culture or parent plate by name, with species, strain and generation (for example “Vial-011924-HECNS-3 · Hericium erinaceus · Lions Maine · G0”). Click it to go up the lineage chain. If the parent can’t be loaded (for example it was deleted), its short ID shows instead with a note.

Observations

A chronological log of growth observations. Each observation records:

• Date
• Growth percentage (0–100%)
• Morphology notes
• Contamination flag

Editing a plate

Click Edit on the detail page to correct the label, vessel, media, media recipe, additives or visual notes. Only the fields you change are saved. The transfer and pour dates can’t be changed after the plate is created.

Printing a label

Click Print label to print a small PDF tag with the plate’s label,, 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; 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.

Logging observations

From the plate detail page, click Log Observation (available in the page header and in the Observations card). Fill in the date, use the slider to set the growth percentage, add morphology notes if relevant, and check the contamination flag if you see signs of contamination. After a flagged observation the plate is re-read, so a contamination badge or status change shows at once.

Observations build a time-series record of how the plate developed. This is useful for comparing plates transferred from the same parent — you can compare growth rates and purity across siblings.

Viewing plate lineage

Click View Lineage on any plate detail page to open the full ancestry and descendant tree. This shows the chain from the lineage root (typically the original culture) all the way down to any liquid cultures or trials that were started from this plate.

Batch creating plates

To create multiple plates from the same parent in one operation, use POST /agar-plates/batch-create via the API. Provide the source type (culture or plate), the source ID, a count, the media type, and the transfer date. All children are created with status Colonizing and share a processing_batch_id for grouped tracking.

Deleting a plate

Open the plate detail page and click Delete. Deletion is permanent and removes all observation records associated with the plate. Parent references from child plates and liquid cultures are preserved for lineage history, but the parent record itself will show as missing.

Role requirements