Greetings,
I'm writing because I am trying to get my feet wet with understanding isolates and terminology. I have read and scoured pages on here, but still cannot get a clear answer. So any help would be appreciated.
Let's say I buy a MSS and I want to select for a nice looking fruit. From my understanding, you would first grow that MSS out, then swab a nice fruit, put to agar, and put to grain. Grow it out again, find another nice fruit, swab it, put to agar, and put to grain. Grow it again... and do this like 3-4 more times. Eventually, I would hope to get mostly big boys. Is this the process of obtaining an isolate? If not, what am I missing?
I have also heard of individuals using agar and selecting from sections on their plate. I guess I don't quite understand that practice - as you cannot actually see the fruit.
Then the "C" word comes up, but I've heard mixed reviews. Like, I cannot just grow out an MSS and clone the biggest fruit and then keep doing this to get an isolate, or can I?
All in all - whats the best way to get a stable bunch of fruits with the traits I like?
All this is new to me and just breaking it down to some fairly early to understand language would be appreciate.
I hope I have made some sense, and thank you for your time.
-RRoy
-------------------- RapidR
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I'll start by writing that the "best way" is subjective and it sounds like you have enough of an understanding to get going, so do that, and see what happens. Patience and experimentation are your friends.
EG: I don't like mega-huge cubes, so I would never select for them in my cloning. But I'm sure we'll continue to see folks stoked and bragging about their wrist- or arm-sized mushrooms and that's all well and good!
Some people swear by isolating before fruiting, and some people get great results using multispore grows then cloning from there. But typically, people use the word "isolate" as a noun when the mycelium is consistently/uniformly growing and usually rhizomorphic in appearance. It seems to me that folks use the term as a morphological distinction rather than a genetic one. There's also the potential confusion/misinterpretation that the same word can be a noun or a verb.
The best clone I've had for many years (BHT) was originally an MS grow that I fruited without much agar work then cloned from the first flush. On agar, they sectored (as expected), so I isolated the sectors on agar (2-4 transfers) until I got "isolate" type growth from each of them. Then I grew each of those "isolates" to fruition and selected a few "best" mushrooms, grew each of those out without much agar work and chose another "best" clone, and then I stopped agar tinkering. Those became my master cultures (many stored back-ups) and I've had consistently good results with those genetics without knowing however many parents are in the full genetic diversity of the clone.
You may find this thread helpful as well.
The question I'd like answers to: If plasmogamy has already occurred across an entire fungus, then we fruit and clone a sporocarp, wouldn't the multi-sectored mycelium be genetically identical across the body of the fungus?
If so, what do the sectors actually represent?
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