Trials
Run and evaluate fruiting trials to assess culture performance before committing to production.
Trials
A trial is a controlled fruiting test on a single agar plate. You run trials to evaluate how a culture performs on a given substrate before committing it to a full production run. Trials track yield, biological efficiency, and morphology, and when a trial passes your quality bar, you can promote it to a named strain in your strain library.
Viewing trials
Navigate to Lab > Trials to see all trials. Use the tabs at the top to filter by disposition:
- All — every trial regardless of outcome
- In Progress — trials that have not yet been evaluated
- Pass — trials that met your quality bar
- Fail — trials that did not meet expectations
- Inconclusive — trials that produced ambiguous results
Each row shows the source plate, substrate, inoculation date, total yield, biological efficiency, and disposition.
Click any row to open the trial detail page.
Creating a trial
Click New Trial to open the trial creation form.
Required fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Source Plate | The agar plate being evaluated; selected from a dropdown of your existing plates |
| Substrate | The substrate formulation used (e.g. “Wheat bran supplemented hardwood”) |
| Inoculation Date | When the trial was inoculated |
New trials start with disposition In Progress automatically. All other performance metrics are filled in as the trial progresses.
Trial detail
The detail page is divided into three sections:
Details
- Source Plate — short ID linking back to the agar plate record
- Inoculation Date — trial start date
- Disposition — current pass/fail/inconclusive status
- Spawn Run Days — days to full colonization (if recorded)
- Pin Date — when pins first appeared (if recorded)
- First Harvest Date — date of first harvest (if recorded)
Performance
Appears once any performance data has been entered:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Total Yield | Cumulative harvest weight in grams |
| Biological Efficiency | Yield as a percentage of dry substrate weight |
| Morphology Score | Subjective quality score, 1 to 10 |
Notes
Free-text field for observations, anomalies, environmental conditions, or anything relevant to interpreting the results.
Updating a trial
Click Edit on the trial detail page to open the update form. You can update:
- Disposition (In Progress, Pass, Fail, Inconclusive)
- Total yield (g)
- Biological efficiency (%)
- Morphology score (1–10)
- Spawn run days
- Pin date
- First harvest date
- Notes
Update the trial each time you have new data — after colonization, at pinning, and at each harvest. This builds a complete record of the trial timeline.
Disposition values
| Disposition | Meaning |
|---|---|
| In Progress | Trial is ongoing; results not yet final |
| Pass | Trial met your quality criteria; eligible for promotion to strain |
| Fail | Trial did not meet criteria |
| Inconclusive | Results were ambiguous — environmental factors or anomalies prevented a clear evaluation |
Promoting a trial to a strain
When a trial’s disposition is set to Pass, the Promote to Strain button becomes available on the detail page. Clicking it:
- Walks the lineage chain from the source plate back to the originating culture to retrieve species and strain name.
- Checks how many strains of the same species already exist to assign a version number.
- Creates a new strain record in your strain library with status Active.
You are then redirected to the Strains page. The trial record is preserved with its data intact.
A trial can only be promoted once. If you need to create a second strain from the same trial, use the strain promotion flow on the Strains page, which lets you pick any passing trial directly.
Viewing trial lineage
Click View Lineage on any trial detail page to trace the ancestry back through the source plate and its parent culture chain.
Role requirements
| Action | Minimum role |
|---|---|
| View list and detail | Worker |
| Create and update | Worker |
| Promote to strain | Worker |