wildernessjunkie said:

SG30 spores were revived after 30 years. IIRC though, there was an extensive period of rehydration for the spores though.

As far as freezing goes though, I would suspect the biggest issue would be ice crystalizing and potentially damaging the walls of the spore.

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DynGBreeD said:

wildernessjunkie said:

SG30 spores were revived after 30 years. IIRC though, there was an extensive period of rehydration for the spores though.

As far as freezing goes though, I would suspect the biggest issue would be ice crystalizing and potentially damaging the walls of the spore.

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If one had an extra mini freezer, do you think the fridge could be set at a certain temp to prolong spore Syringes? Thus keeping from freezing/crystallizing the spores? I have an old Frigidaire that has all sorts of Temp settings. I figured you may know. Thanks

DB

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gornyhuy said:

I'm really surprised to hear you had such a failure rate.  Were they exposed to very high heat or something?!  I have mine bagged and vacuum packed, but they are at "room temperature".  I too have MANY strains on print and would be really upset if they were all bad when I whip them out in 10 or 20 years.

Am I misinformed? I thought spores would last indefinitely.

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Quote:

There must be a way to store spores in a way that preserves their viability for extended periods of like 5 - 10 years surely.

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Freezing is not a good idea - at least none of my long-frozen samples ever germinated.   Spores on a print aren't dehydrated (otherwise how would they germinate?), and freezing bursts the cell wall.  I suppose you could deliberately dry the print completely and then freeze it though.

On the other hand refrigeration works IME. I've germinated 15 year old refrigerated spores (Ps. cyan) after extended (month or so) soaking.  Cubensis are not supposed to be quite as hardy, but I've seen isolated reports, certainly 5 years is not too old.  You just need to rehydrate the spores fully to obtain germination.

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I too have MANY strains on print and would be really upset if they were all bad when I whip them out in 10 or 20 years.

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Good luck with that. Germination even after soaking was like...just a few spores. I'm only going back to a 15 year old print on account of it was a mutated strain that I really want to have back.

But I have only a limited amount of experience with reviving old spores, although I do have a bunch of old prints of various psilocybin species - some kept at room temp, some frozen, and some refrigerated (covering all bases, see ).

PS

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Spores on a print must be dehydrated to some degree otherwise what is the point of re-hydrating them in order to germinate them? .

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They dry out slowly - it takes years. Otherwise FRESH prints would have the same germination speed as OLD prints and they don't.  OK?

Anyway, I vaguely recall doing an experiment while trying to get germination from old prints that had been in the freezer - I froze a fresh print for a few days and then tried to germinate off of it - got nothing.  But that's easy to try.  Freezing a syringe isn't quite the same thing as freezing a print, but I'll grant it's interesting.  Another factor I'm sure is that most of the time I was storing the prints in a freezer that had no automatic defrost, so they stayed below zero all the time.  That fridge died years ago and the replacement goes through a defrost cycle every few days that sounds like a hyena in heat.  Yeah nothing but the best here...

Maybe I'll try this again - I have got some vintage cube strains (my long-lost "happy lads" ) and other stuff in the freezer that I'd like have back. 

Re LN if you snap freeze 'em (dipping into liquid nitrogen) the crystals don't have time to grow.  So that's always been my alternate method in the-best-of-all-worlds.  Snap freeze and store well below zero continuously.

And hey, if you'd like some fresh, uhm, promotional CDs just PM me.

PS