Tissue culture concepts
Plants, explants, and stages
xPlant organizes tissue culture records into three connected concepts: Plants, Explants, and Stages. Understanding how they work together makes it easier to document cultures, track their development, and build complete laboratory histories.
Plants
A Plant is the named parent organism — the source of all culture material in xPlant. It holds a species, cultivar, photo, origin notes, and any tags or labels you apply. It also carries its own stage history (Mother Block, Production, Field, etc.) that reflects the condition of the parent plant itself, not its in vitro derivatives.
Plants are permanent records. Even when all its culture material has been discarded, the plant record stays in your library so you have a complete history of what was worked on and when.
Plant stage options
Explants
An Explant is a piece of tissue taken from a parent plant for in vitro propagation. Each explant has its own label, its own stage history, and its own contamination and observation record. It is always linked to one parent plant.
When you initiate three vessels from the same mother plant in one session, create three separate explants — one per vessel or tissue type. This lets you track each culture independently: Vessel A might contaminate while Vessels B and C continue successfully.
Explant stage options
Stages
A Stage entry records a single point in the lifecycle of a plant or explant. Each entry captures:
- Stage type (e.g. Multiplication, Rooting)
- Status (Active, Completed, Failed, etc.)
- Entry date and optional start / completion timestamps
- Observation notes from the bench
- Room or physical location
- Optional media recipe reference
- Optional SOP reference
Stage entries stack chronologically into a timeline. The current stage is always the most recent. Previous stages are never overwritten — they form a permanent audit trail.
The key distinction
Plant stages track the condition of the mother plant — is it in production, in quarantine, or discarded? Explant stages track the state of the tissue culture process — is this culture at initiation, rooting, or acclimatization?
A plant can be active as a Mother Block while its explants are simultaneously at Multiplication, Rooting, and Acclimatization. Each record answers a different question.