Visualizing culture lineages?

Was feeling nerdy at home on this snowy day, and started making a graph visualization of my culture propagation using figma:

was imagining as I propagate the culture from the master cultures (the culture library) through LC to grain to bulk, I would create a branch diagram in figma, to log the steps, and eventually the yields.

Wonder if anyone has run across any other tools for doing something like this. I could imagine someone having at some point made a strangely specific tool for keeping track of cultures like this.

Before with kiezpilz we were just using a spreadsheet, which also works, but I thought a branching diagram might be nice.

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maybe with a myco/culture specific tool, you would just quickly type what you made (with any special info about it) with a reference to what its source was, and then that would be all the tool needed to make graph visualizations automatically

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So I’ve been working on something like this on-and-off for three years now haha. Not so much the visualisation part but more like the underlying database and interface. I think it started as a Python / Flask project (mycofile) and then I transitioned to Rust (myka).

Here’s the repo for myka: A culture library & cultivation log for tracking the expansion of mycelia. From the readme:

myka has begun life as a local storage and query tool for interacting with a library of fungal cultures. It will grow to allow the storage and querying of culture lines, with each line forming an append-only log of cultivation events (e.g. agar → grain → woodchips).

Additional (imagined) capabilities will include tracking yields and environmental conditions to allow for optimization based on generated statistics.

The eventual goal is to make myka truly mycelial by leveraging p2p sociotechnology…

Hypercore + Hyperswarm

Back-up your virtual library and cultivation logs with peers. Share your virtual library with peers to facilitate trade. Share media and substrate recipes with peers.

The basic design is a command-line tool with a SQLite database. The CLI_API.md doc offers an outline of the planned interface and types of interactions.

Most recently, after a lot of head-scratching about how to add substrate ingredients, I settled on using TOML files to store recipes. This is pretty cool because it offers a humyn-readable way to add and edit recipes. These recipes can then be linked-to by ID when specifying a substrate for a culture line item (in other words, a single instance of a culture in a discreet container).

Here’s a screenshot: the window on the left shows a TOML file containing the recipe for Potato Dextrose Agar (PDA). The window on the right shows example usage of the myka tool to print out a recipe by tag. It’s also possible to print recipes according to a given ingredient.

I’m trying to design it all in such a way that it would be easy to integrate with a front-end client (this could be where the visualisation aspects comes in). The Line object is where the magic’s at in terms of linking expansion events; each new instance of a culture points back to the ID of the parent culture / container.

The whole thing still needs a ton of thought and work but I think it could be pretty cool :slightly_smiling_face:

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haha it seems I asked in the right forum – this looks great. interesting about the recipes. makes sense that there could be a CLI-backend and then a front-end. I would be curious to try it. I love how clear and simple the system is.

A couple thoughts that popped into my head looking at this:

  • how myka would handle when you make 10 jars at once (and don’t want to run add ten times)
  • an unstructured notes field on objects, for all the times when weird stuff happens, which has been a frequent part of my cultivation experience (like I accidentally poured half a jar of LC into this grain jar, which isn’t exactly a recipe, but is something to remember)
    … but just first thoughts
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