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

Source: https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-cell-line-passport/  
OnCo record `idea-tr2-cell-line-passport` (Idea). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

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.

## Summary

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.

## Fields

- Kind: Idea
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- 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.
- Proposed test: 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
- Actor: engineering

## Sources

- Cellosaurus: https://www.cellosaurus.org/

## Connected records

- ideas: [Barcode every reagent lot so batch effects can be traced across experiments and labs](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-reagent-lot-ledger/), [Every drug screen includes standard reference compounds whose performance is published](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-reference-compound-panels/), [Prove your cell lines are what you say they are, or the paper is not published](https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-tr2-cell-line-authentication-mandate/)
- bottlenecks: [Lab models that fail to predict what happens in patients](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-preclinical-models/), [Preclinical results do not reproduce](https://onco.cc/bottlenecks/b-reproducibility/)

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