Templates

Media bottle label maker

A media bottle is a shared object with an invisible history: what was added, when it was opened, and how many people have been into it since.

Open this template in the editor76.2 × 50.8 mm

76.2 × 50.8 mm (3.00 × 2.00 in). The inner outline is the 1 mm safe area. Wraps a 50 mL conical tube or a reagent bottle.

Supplements are the whole problem

Base medium is stable and well identified by its own manufacturer label. What is not identified is the serum lot, the glutamine, the antibiotics and anything else added after it arrived — and those are the things that change results between two bottles that look identical.

A media label that records the supplements and the date they were added turns an unexplainable difference between two flasks into a two-second check. Serum lot in particular is worth its space: lot-to-lot variation in FBS is real, and a bottle that has moved to a new lot mid-experiment explains more failures than most people expect.

Fields worth the space on a 76 × 51 mm label

Base medium and catalogue identity: DMEM high glucose is not DMEM low glucose, and neither is obvious once the bottle is half empty.
Serum, with lot: 10% FBS, lot number. The lot is what makes a difference reproducible or not.
Antibiotics: Present or absent, and which. A contamination that appears in the antibiotic-free bottle is a finding; in the other one it is a problem.
Date opened: Not just the date prepared. Time at 4 °C after opening is what governs glutamine loss and the risk of contamination.
Whose it is: Shared cold rooms are where unlabelled bottles go to be thrown away by someone else.

Text capacity at 76.2 × 50.8 mm

Type size	Lines	Plex Sans	Barlow Condensed	Atkinson Hyperlegible	Plex Mono	Space Mono	Courier Prime
4.5 pt	26	97	134	98	77	76	77
5 pt	23	87	120	88	70	68	70
6 pt	19	73	100	73	58	57	58
7 pt	16	62	86	63	50	49	50
8 pt	14	54	75	55	43	42	43
10 pt	11	43	60	44	35	34	35

The largest of the stock templates. Enough for six or seven readable lines. Figures are characters per line, for 76.2 × 50.8 mm. Measured against the string “Tris-HCl 1 M pH 8.0 25 mg/mL 2026-08-24 GS lot B-204 store 4 C”, which is representative of laboratory text rather than of prose.

Common questions

What should go on a cell culture media bottle?: The base medium, every supplement added after it arrived, the serum lot, the date opened and the owner. The manufacturer's own label already covers the base medium's identity and expiry; your label covers what you did to it.
Why record the date opened rather than the date prepared?: Because the clock that matters starts at first opening: glutamine degrades over weeks at 4 °C, and every subsequent entry is a contamination opportunity.

Open it in the editor

The editor loads at 76.2 × 50.8 mm with a worked example in place. It runs entirely in your browser: nothing you type is uploaded, and there is no account to make.

Open the media bottle template

Last reviewed 2026-08-24.