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Invisibledavidb199
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Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium)
    #26562829 - 03/28/20 09:47 AM (3 years, 9 months ago)

I thought that's proper place for it
So because I live far far from civilized countries I can only order something from china, and wait 30 days to receive

so I found Agar-agar chinese version, here is the pic, I guess its high in sodium? and that's bad for fungi... any ideas?



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everything I write on this forum is just a horse poo. don't take it seriously.
I don't grow or have any contact with mushrooms. except my own mushroomtip..


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InvisibleBabuFrik
Logs, wood chips & sawdust

Registered: 01/28/20 Happy 4th Shroomiversary!
Posts: 26
Loc: Kijimi
Re: Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium) [Re: davidb199]
    #26567473 - 03/30/20 02:32 PM (3 years, 9 months ago)

Fungi use a higher concentration of sodium ions inside the cell to help bring in water and maintain turgor pressure. The pressure promotes expansion of hyphal tips and is a reason why water is so important. A high concentration of salt outside the cell might cause growth to slow because the cell would have to work harder against the concentration gradient. That is my awareness of the fungal biology of it. But I do not believe that is going to be a problem here.

The package label is a little bit confusing. I am wondering if the "NRV" in the right column is referring to Australia's "Nutrient Reference Value?" It does not make sense to me because the MoH's sodium AI is 2000 mg/day. I can be dense sometimes so probably I am missing something obvious.

The middle column appears to be a better measure of concentration because it deals with masses so maybe we can ignore that right column for now. I am reading the middle as "78 mg of sodium per 100 g of material." If we move the decimal around to bring all the units into agreement, it becomes  0.078 g sodium per 100.000 g of material. That is <1% sodium which is pretty much trace in food products. That is normal for a regular agar that I would buy from the store.

In my research lab we use a very common, high-salt media called Miller LB broth for bacteria. That is around 40% NaCl before it is mixed up. A variant of that used for plating bacterial cells is called Miller LB agar, and that is about 25% NaCl before it is mixed up. I have used both for some fungi work but they do not perform better than malt extract and I think that has to do with the high salt content and also the lower sugar content. But a little bit of salt in the malt extract broth helps the growth in my experience.


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OfflineSolipsis
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Re: Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium) [Re: BabuFrik]
    #26568485 - 03/31/20 05:55 AM (3 years, 9 months ago)

It would be good to know a concentration best not to exceed, for sodium or NaCl.

Apparently potassium is much better tolerated so generally the ideal one to use, and it can typically substitute for sodium.

I use gellan gum to make gels  but it requires cations to get certain properties. I use calcium right now which is divalent. I don't have any potassium salts but that could give me other options / properties for the gel. I think it changes the brittleness or elasticity.

Anyway, the label says 781 mg. Because 781 mg is indeed 39% of the 2000 mg daily AI.


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InvisibleBabuFrik
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Registered: 01/28/20 Happy 4th Shroomiversary!
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Re: Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium) [Re: Solipsis]
    #26568961 - 03/31/20 11:59 AM (3 years, 9 months ago)

Quote:

Solipsis said:

Anyway, the label says 781 mg. Because 781 mg is indeed 39% of the 2000 mg daily AI.





Ooof! Thanks Solipsis. I did not see that "1" at the end of 781. It looked like it was part of the hanzi next to it  :facepalm: I miss obvious bits like that all the time.


Quote:

Solipsis said:
It would be good to know a concentration best not to exceed, for sodium or NaCl.





I do not know that one, but I think <1% of the pre-solvated 100 g of material is a comfortable level. My Chinese is very poor and I do not understand the system of concentration they are using so I am hoping that this is per 100 g of material and not per 100 g of solution.


Quote:

Solipsis said:
Apparently potassium is much better tolerated so generally the ideal one to use, and it can typically substitute for sodium.

I use gellan gum to make gels  but it requires cations to get certain properties. I use calcium right now which is divalent. I don't have any potassium salts but that could give me other options / properties for the gel. I think it changes the brittleness or elasticity.





I did a little bit of digging through the literature and found a few articles that corroborated some of the things we are talking about. The earliest article I came across on the topic was by Jones & Jennings from back in the 60s[1]. They discussed low levels of sodium promoting dry weight production, but elevated levels inhibiting it. They also said that they saw the greatest growth in terms of dry weight by using potassium and that was interesting to learn.

I do not know much about the role of potassium inside the fungal cell yet but there appears to be several articles about things like Trk and the role that fungi play in potassium transport for plants.

The plant partnership information that I came across discusses fungi helping to increase availability of potassium in the soil, mediating or facilitating uptake of potassium in the rhizosphere through direct contact in mycorrhizal symbioses, and potentially inducing plant gene expression for potassium transporters. Even though the fungi we grow are not mycorrhizal the overarching theme is still how important potassium is for fungi and plants. The claims appear to be logical enough when you think about how these organisms evolved together over the ages.

The Trk material is very interesting to me. Trk is a family of voltage-gated ion channels that move potassium around. The voltage-gating system involves a certain difference in concentration of ions outside the cell for the channel to open and allow potassium to pass through it. I know that the Na/K pumps in human cells move 3 sodium ions out for every 2 potassium ions in, establishing a net negative potential inside the cell. I am assuming that something similar might be occurring in fungal cells. I think that might be correct because we know that there is a positive ionic halo around the tips of growing hyphae. I can not say what is going on for certain because I do not know, but we see a lot of similarity in cellular systems across different eukaryotes.

There is some movement of potassium and sodium through their respective channels and pumps in the human system, but even though we are talking fungi I am comfortable disagreeing that those ions are interchangeable as far as cellular processes are concerned. This is mainly because there are size and steric structures established by the protein sequences that prevent that interchangeable movement for the most part.

I enjoy this topic a lot and hope to learn more!


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OfflineSolipsis
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Re: Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium) [Re: BabuFrik]
    #26570497 - 04/01/20 06:56 AM (3 years, 9 months ago)

True. I am a chemist originally so I was talking about the interchangability in that sense. In the context of the gellan gum I use for media gel I would certainly expect them to behave very similarly as monovalent relatively unreactive cations.

Interesting about the potassium, intriguing. Makes sense that they make much use of it if they are also reportedly quite tolerant to it being included in media.
Makes me wonder what all that calcium from gypsum is for. Also certain ion channels, some voltage-gated? Haha would the meds I take have any effect then on fungi? It is pregabalin which is a voltage-dependent calcium channel blocker.
But of course quite possible even small differences in the protein conformation of these calcium channels are different between humans and fungi so then it probably wouldn't work.

Getting ahead of things there lol.

Anyway let me see what I can dig up about these ions in my textbook Introduction to Fungi.


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Invisibledavidb199
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Re: Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium) [Re: Solipsis]
    #26575019 - 04/03/20 10:49 AM (3 years, 9 months ago)

thanks guys for a lot of info !
I found similar product but more transparent and white, this one was looking yellowish, meaning it had some impurities I believe.

the one I bought was similar to lab agar( as seller description stated), so I thought that would be better.
will follow up this thread after some experiments...


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everything I write on this forum is just a horse poo. don't take it seriously.
I don't grow or have any contact with mushrooms. except my own mushroomtip..


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OfflineSolipsis
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Re: Agar nutrition details for agar tek (high sodium) [Re: davidb199]
    #26581001 - 04/06/20 04:25 AM (3 years, 9 months ago)

Yes discoloration can be a potential indicator for impurities but it is definitely not as much of a guarantee in many situations as you might think. It can often happen in chemistry that very low levels of a particular impurity are present but it is just so strongly colored that the resultant discoloration is quite noticeable nonetheless.

On the other hand, impurities can also have (almost) no color and still pose a problem.

But I don't wanna be a dick, of course we need something to go on if it's real hard to have a decent idea about the purity otherwise.

I promised to look into calcium (Ca2+) and roles it's known to play in filamentous fungi (what is all that calcium needed for in that gypsum people are giving?)

Well my textbook mentions an important role of calcium: it is involved in the stretching and growing of hyphal tips which are the actually growing part of the mycelium. And it works indeed through calcium channels.

Not that this makes me an expert all of a sudden but I'd like to place 2 sidenotes with that of my own:
- I think considering you can still grow mycelium for quite a serious bit without supplementing with any appreciable mineral components like that, it suggests fungi can be really efficient with the amount they have and my personal bet is that as with other trace elements they may be pretty good at recycling and transporting it only to where it is needed and may stretch their reserves pretty far. However, perhaps the transport costs a bunch of energy you would rather not waste.
- I wonder if it makes a big difference if you have tomentose growth, with a lot of branching there are a LOT more hyphal tips aren't there? Hmmm, do calcium concentrations in substrate / media play a role (one of many possible factors) in deciding when you get more tomentose growth and when more rhizomorphic growth? Just a thought.


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