multifractal said:

Grain of salt time:

They are almost certainly not monocultures after just 5 transfers. I'm pretty sure the only true way to confirm if something is a monoculture is by microscopy. Even a plate that shows no sectoring isn't necessarily a monoculture. Is there really any way to produce monocultures other than by germinating a single spore? Even a culture containing only one dikaryon pairing (would this be considered a monoculture?) seems to me to only be feasible either by some sort of more sophisticated mechanical separation or through the "mating" of two monokaryotic cultures rather than by performing transfers.

Is the term "isolate" simply referring to a culture that no longer shows sectoring? If so then yeah, those look close to being an "isolate"

If any of this is incorrect please let me know.

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p9hu7 said:

If you look very closely at your plates you can see that there are spaces between the ropes of mycelium, this is a sector. Even if you were able to isolate one of those sectors, say with a syringe, that rhizomorphic rope contains further thousands of microscopic hyphal filaments all wrapped and intertwined together.

A strain is a single microscopic dikaryotic hyphal filament.

If you grab a magnifying glass you'll better be able to see the separate sectors, but those sectors are teeming with a lattice of individual microscopic strains.

Your plates look very clean though, nice work

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