Lab workflow

Lab rooms

Organize the physical spaces in your tissue culture lab and keep location context connected to your culture records. Use rooms to track where plants and explants are located as they move through transfer, incubation, acclimatization, and other stages of your workflow.

Track where cultures are located

Assign a room or work area to a plant or explant stage so your team can see where culture material is located within the lab. Update the room as cultures move through your workflow.

Use room codes and aliases

Give rooms recognizable names, short codes, and aliases that match the terminology your lab already uses. Consistent identifiers also make room information easier to work with when importing existing culture records.

See cultures by room

Use room information to understand which plants and explants are associated with different areas of your lab and where active culture work is concentrated.

Plan around lab capacity

Add capacity information where useful to give your team more context about how different lab spaces are being used. This can help when organizing cultures across growth rooms, racks, shelves, or other production areas.

Manage rooms as your lab changes

Create and update rooms as your tissue culture setup evolves. Use room names and identifiers that reflect the physical spaces your team works with every day.

Preserve location context over time

When a room is no longer part of your active workflow, archive it rather than reusing it for a different space. This helps keep historical culture records understandable as your lab changes.

Common areas in a tissue culture lab

Every tissue culture lab is organized differently. Set up rooms and work areas that reflect your actual workflow, from aseptic transfer and culture incubation to media preparation and acclimatization.

Aseptic TransferLaminar flow hood areas and other spaces used for inoculation, transfer, and subculture work.

Culture IncubationGrowth rooms, chambers, shelves, and light racks used to maintain cultures between transfers.

Media PreparationAreas used for preparing, mixing, dispensing, and organizing tissue culture media.

Cold StorageRefrigerated or temperature-controlled areas used for appropriate lab materials or cultures.

AcclimatizationAreas used as plantlets transition from in vitro culture toward ex vitro growing conditions.

GreenhouseGreenhouse or protected growing areas used during later stages of the plant workflow.

Set up lab rooms in xPlant

Create your lab rooms

Open your lab settings and add the rooms or work areas you want to represent in xPlant. Start with the physical spaces your team already uses, such as transfer areas, growth rooms, media preparation areas, or acclimatization spaces.

Add clear names and identifiers

Give each room a recognizable name and, where useful, a short code or alias. Using the same terminology as your existing labels and spreadsheets can make records easier for your team to recognize and organize.

Assign rooms to culture records

When recording or updating stage information, select the room that represents the culture's current location. Keep the assignment up to date as plants and explants move through your lab workflow.

Rooms across your tissue culture workflow

Room assignments add location context to the rest of your culture records. Alongside stages, transfers, media recipes, SOPs, and contamination observations, they help your team understand not only what happened to a culture, but where that work took place.

As plants and explants move through your lab, keeping room information up to date makes it easier to review culture history and understand the context around transfers and observations.

Plan limits