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Culture Mediums
A compilation of various culture mediums used for agar or other pure culture techniques.
Below are some culture mediums from various books.
- PDA - Wash, peel, or un-peeled, and dice the potatoes (200 g). Place in a pot and add 100 ml of distilled water. Boil until potatoes are soft enough to be eaten but not over cooked. Strain the decoction through cheesecloth (or a thin layer of cotton) in the funnel: collect the liquid in a graduated cylinder and/or Erlenmeyer flask. Restore the volume of decoction to 1000 ml by adding fresh distilled water and put back in the pot. Set aside potatoes. Add dextrose (20 g) and agar (18 g) powders to the pot. Heat to boiling while stirring occasionally until the agar is completely dissolved. Transfer the medium into a 10-ml test tube and/or into 250 ml Erlenmeyer flask and plug with cotton. Cover loosely again with aluminum foil.
- PDASE - The distilled water used in PDA medium can be replaced by adding straw extract solution. The amount of straw used for extraction can be variable according to the type of straws. In general, 100 to 100 g of dry straw are usually used to make 1 liter of extract. The rest of the procedures are the same as described in PDA.
- CM (Complete Medium) - The Complete agar medium (Raper and Miles 1958) is constantly used for Volvariella culture. The chemical components are as follows:
MgSO4 * 7H2O 0.5 g KH2PO4 0.46 g K2HPO4 1.00 g Bacteriological peptone 2.00 g Dextrose 20.00 g Agar (Sigma type IV) 20.00 g Thiamine-HCI 0.5 mg Distilled water 1 liter - V8 Medium - The commercial V8 juice is occasionally used for tissue cultures of edible mushrooms. One liter water, 50 ml V8 Juice, 20 g of agar, and 0.2 g CaCO3. It should be noted that most mushrooms prefer neutral to slightly acid range of medium, that is, a pH of about 5.5 to 6.5. However the straw mushroom, Volvariella volvacea, prefers a high pH medium, 6.8 to 7.8. Therefore, it is important to make sure the acidity or pH of the medium is correct for a particular mushroom. Here be careful to use a container much larger then the volume of medium, I.e, prepare a 500 ml medium in 2 liter flasks or it will tend to boil over no matter how slowly it is cooled down.
- MA - Care must be taken used with malt not to exceed 10 pounds pressure for 20 minutes. Higher temperatures cause malt sugars to caramelize, preventing the agar from jelling properly.
H20 1 liter Malt powder 20 g Corn Steepwater 20 ml Ca OH2 0.2 g K2HPO4 0.3 g Agar 20 g - V-8 Oatmeal - Here be careful to use a container much larger then the volume of medium, I.e, prepare a 500 ml medium in 2 liter flasks or it will tend to boil over no matter how slowly it is cooled down.
Water 1 liter V-8 juice 50 ml Cram of oats 25 g Agar 20 g