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ideasIdea

A digital passport for every cell culture: identity, contamination status, passage number

Each batch of cells used in an experiment would carry a small digital record showing when it was authenticated, tested for contamination, and how many times it had been grown, attached to the published result.

Beyond identity, mycoplasma contamination and high passage number change cell behaviour and drug sensitivity. A lightweight standard (a signed JSON record with STR match, mycoplasma test date, passage, source and thaw date) generated by lab inventory software and attached to figures or methods as a persistent identifier would make culture provenance auditable and enable meta-analyses of how provenance affects results.

Hypothesis
Papers with passports will show higher replication rates in subsequent independent studies than those without, and passport data will reveal passage-dependent drug-sensitivity shifts in commonly used lines.
Rationale
Provenance metadata standards (for sequencing runs, for reagents) improved reproducibility where adopted; cell culture lacks one.
What would test it
Implement the standard in two open-source lab inventory tools; pilot in ten labs; audit reproducibility of a sample of results with and without passports.
Maturity
speculative
Who has to act
engineering
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
2
Bottlenecks it attacks

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