Perpetuating the grow: Culture

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HairSnake
Science Nerd

Registered: 06/19/15
Posts: 11
Loc: Midwest USA
Last seen: 2 years, 6 months

Perpetuating the grow: Culture "Library" and what to do next?

#21937388 - 07/13/15 01:43 PM (11 years, 1 month ago)

I am sure these questions are answered somewhere in the forums, but I am confused with the results using the keywords I have tried.

Assuming I have a sterile environments and contaminate free spawn... I see a fair amount of Teks explaining almost every individual procedure. But I am not seeing one that puts these super detailed and helpful steps together in a bigger picture of perpetuating the process.

I am considering taking a sample from a BRF cake or a kernel of inoculated grain from a spawn jar, or even a sample from a commercially produced colonized spawn bag and dropping it onto a petri dish of nutrified agar. I've been using PDAY.
My goal is to create a culture stock library of ten or twenty petri dishes/test tube slants of each species I try to grow, to pull out of the fridge whenever I decide to grow another batch or as a back up if something goes awry happened the last time I tried to expand the Lions Mane mycelium and lost it all. Essentially, so I don't have to buy spores, liquid culture, or commercially produced sawdust spawn every time I want to grow something.

I know it will grow. I recently dropped a 2x2 mm sample of blue oyster started on BRF cake onto PDAY petri dishes and they are colonizing nicely.

I also understand that if starting with spores, there is no way to isolate a specific strain with the above technique (at least onto the first dish), which is a goal in effective spawn making. But beyond that, is there any reason that this won't work?

Senescence is also a point of confusion. If the sample is taken before the mushroom produces its fruiting body, It stands to reason that since it actively colonizing substrate already, it should be genetically young enough to colonize further substrate, even if that additional substrate is punctuated by some time in the refrigerator, right?

If so, can this process be done in perpetuity?

Or if not forever, I predict it should work like this: (using Stamets P values)

Donor spawn from a colonized jar to produce 10 petri dishes, I guess we'll call P1. Spawn to fruit from P1 as needed but reserving a P1 for:

P1 - to generate 10 test tubes of P2 as culture stock
use 9 of the P2 to inoculate and fruit as needed
P2 - Reserved and used to generate 10 test tubes of P3
Use 9 of the P3 to inoculate and fruit as needed
P3- Reserved and used to generate 10 test tubes of P4.

There are several questions within this post. Do I understand this well enough. Please correct my erroneous assumptions if there is anything fundamentally wrong with what I am thinking.

Thanks.

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A sure sign of happiness is when its difficult to determine whether one is working or playing.

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Bemushroomed
Earthling.

Registered: 02/10/10
Posts: 31
Loc: Rome, Italy

Last seen: 4 years, 7 months

Re: Perpetuating the grow: Culture "Library" and what to do next?

[Re: HairSnake]
#21937507 - 07/13/15 02:15 PM (11 years, 1 month ago)

Hello HairSnake,
every grower should have his personal culture bank. Basically we all start a master slant/vial/petri from the very first free contaminants mycelium we obtain. It's always better make a master culture from a "young" culture but like you can imagine isn't easy to find "young" cultures, except if you clone from a wild specimen your culture. Except for the culture obtained from the wild specimen you have to cross your fingers. I've a clone of a commercial oyster strain that works good, but I don't know any info or the "age" of this strain. About the P-value I use the PFK value (Petri Fake): when you obtain a culture and you don't have any info you use the PFK1 value, when you'll give away your strain the next grower will label it like PFK2. If you label it P1 the grower will label his clone a P2, that's wrong because nobody know the story of that strain.

Start cultures obtained from trusted growers. Discard cheap strains. Don't be paranoid with cultures because, at least you aren't starting a mushroom farm, you won't have any issue with a strain obtained by a friend...but strains obtained from trusted growers are better because you know better the parameters to grow them. I hope this helps.