Creating a Culture

Unlike other assays in LDMS, you can only create a culture from a single aliquot; you cannot select multiple aliquots and create cultures for them at once. If you need to create multiple cultures, you must create each one individually.

Warning:

If you select multiple specimens on the Assay Selection tab, a culture will only be created for the first specimen selected.

Figure: Creating a culture



  1. Create a new assay run, selecting the desired culture assay.

  2. Enter the Culture Setup Date. This is the date that the culture was created (i.e. day 0).

  3. Select the feeding and harvest Schedule.

    Tip:

    To view the events on a schedule, select it, and then click the button from the LDMS toolbar. To see a list of all available schedules and associated events, you can run the Culture Schedule Report, found in Tasks > Reports, and then Culture > Culture Schedule Report.

  4. Select the p24 assay that will be run on the cultures. The p24 assay must be run on cultures in LDMS.

  5. Enter donor information into the Donor # field if you have an established method for tracking donors for cultures. LDMS does not enforce any particular usage of this field.

  6. Enter the Total Volume and Total Volume Units for the prepared culture.

  7. (For quantitative cultures only), specify the way harvests from the culture should be loaded onto p24 assay plates. To add them to the plate top-bottom/left-right, select A1, B1, C1...; to add them to the plate left-right/top-bottom, select A1, A2, B1....

  8. Click the button.

Note:

If you need to return to the culture setup later (for example, to update donor information), select the assay on the Assay Selection tab, and then select the Runs Not Performed/Not Terminated option.

Attention:

The button on the culture setup screen allows you to add unscheduled feeding and harvest events. This is not recommended, as these events do not get tracked in LDMS and will not appear on reports. Unscheduled harvest events will not create additional samples to be run on p24 assays. If you need to create a custom schedule, it is more appropriate to delete the culture, create a custom schedule, and create a new culture.

Creating a culture creates special specimen from the original aliquot. These special specimens cannot be found in LDMS Specimen Management ; they can only be found by looking for specimens assigned to the appropriate p24 assay. They are identified using the same global specimen ID, but will have different harvest dates—specimen will be created for each harvest event in the schedule that was used for the culture.

These sub-aliquots are created automatically, but not immediately. For example, if you create a culture with harvests at days 3 and 10, you will not find them when trying to set up a p24 assay until you are 10 days past the culture setup date.