malvaneglecta said:

I think the community should on some level prioritize protecting genetic diversity, especially since climate change guarantees wild specimens will get less and less diverse. Countries use seed banks to preserve wild genetics so that they can always breed better crops, so it makes sense to have some sort of decentralized version of that on the market place here.

Ideally we would have people that just keep well labeled spore-prints in their fridge, but that leaves the problem of distribution. Everyone on this forum is interested in one thing: growing mushrooms. The tragedy is that every time we go from spore-print to spore-print , genetic diversity is drastically reduced. Realistically it takes only 5-6 generations for a culture to be stabilized, which means many wild genetics are lost forever after that. Everyone from noobs to super-producers is probably working with inbreds because that’s what happens without actively seeking out diverse spores. We aren’t gonna change how the hobby works. 

The way I see it, a single wild spore print should be grown to fruit, and then several of those resulting spore prints should be mailed out. In this way, no one specific person has to try and preserve the diversity. Even if you spore to spore this print several times, it will be different from someone else who received a print from the same person. That way when people are looking to make unique crosses, there’s a high chance that two people actually have spores with unique genetics.

As fun as it is to chase those perfect monotub genetics, there should also be praise given to people who are keeping a unique culture alive, even if it’s shittier than everyone else's. This is an easy way to keep mushrooms available to everyone for a long time.

Sorry for the wall of text, and especially sorry if people are already doing that in the marketplace, since I haven’t had the opportunity to read that, but I love plant breeding and love when I can apply that stuff to mushroom breeding.

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malvaneglecta said:

One thing that excites me is that we still don't know the original habitat for Cubes. They grow all over the world, but it's probably the same story as the Australian; a small group of spores found their way to a new habitat, and something of a "founder effect" occurred. The wild cubes of Australia are much more diverse than our cultivated cubes, but the ones in the wild from the original habitat would probably be SUPER diverse. Hopefully as getting genetic sequences gets cheaper, we get a clearer picture as to where the diversity hotspots are.

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Huskies said:

malvaneglecta said:

I think the community should on some level prioritize protecting genetic diversity, especially since climate change guarantees wild specimens will get less and less diverse. Countries use seed banks to preserve wild genetics so that they can always breed better crops, so it makes sense to have some sort of decentralized version of that on the market place here.

Ideally we would have people that just keep well labeled spore-prints in their fridge, but that leaves the problem of distribution. Everyone on this forum is interested in one thing: growing mushrooms. The tragedy is that every time we go from spore-print to spore-print , genetic diversity is drastically reduced. Realistically it takes only 5-6 generations for a culture to be stabilized, which means many wild genetics are lost forever after that. Everyone from noobs to super-producers is probably working with inbreds because that’s what happens without actively seeking out diverse spores. We aren’t gonna change how the hobby works. 

The way I see it, a single wild spore print should be grown to fruit, and then several of those resulting spore prints should be mailed out. In this way, no one specific person has to try and preserve the diversity. Even if you spore to spore this print several times, it will be different from someone else who received a print from the same person. That way when people are looking to make unique crosses, there’s a high chance that two people actually have spores with unique genetics.

As fun as it is to chase those perfect monotub genetics, there should also be praise given to people who are keeping a unique culture alive, even if it’s shittier than everyone else's. This is an easy way to keep mushrooms available to everyone for a long time.

Sorry for the wall of text, and especially sorry if people are already doing that in the marketplace, since I haven’t had the opportunity to read that, but I love plant breeding and love when I can apply that stuff to mushroom breeding.

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Well that s my plan! I think these would be the steps:

1- Put some spores and agar, then make a syringe from the rest.
2- Use spore solution to inoculate PF TEK cakes.
3- Grow out the wild genes on cakes, and grab multiple prints from them, send them to people.
4- Without isolating too much from the agar plate, putting a T1 or T2 agar plate to grains, spawn those in shoeboxes.
5- Compare the pure wild vs agar isolate group in terms of potency, yield and phenotypes, and of course grab more prints.

Another thing I want to do is mix wild varieties between each other, like continents and centuries apart (Australia and America), and then mix those with commercial strains to revitalize their genepool.

Either way, its looking like the community might rally around this effort. Could be we come across some interesting new discoveries!

malvaneglecta said:

One thing that excites me is that we still don't know the original habitat for Cubes. They grow all over the world, but it's probably the same story as the Australian; a small group of spores found their way to a new habitat, and something of a "founder effect" occurred. The wild cubes of Australia are much more diverse than our cultivated cubes, but the ones in the wild from the original habitat would probably be SUPER diverse. Hopefully as getting genetic sequences gets cheaper, we get a clearer picture as to where the diversity hotspots are.

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I think the recentish discoveries of Natalensis and Ochras in South Africa, both cousin species to cubensis to the point of being able to be cross together, indicates that the of cubensis is probably African in origin.

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I’m on board to do this too. I have a project that will diversify genetics and I will be spreading the fruits of my labor. I read that paper a few weeks ago and it inspired me to get this going. I’ll also document my project in this thread.

Axman said:

Well it just so happens I recently finally ran my wild print to fruit and have several questionably clean prints. I have it documented from find -> present day information here.

I'm still deciding on what way to go about releasing the spores to the community. My original plan was to pick a pheno and work my way to stabilizing it, then doing a marketplace giveaway.





I have about 5 or so tubs of F-1 actively fruiting and a bunch of F-2 in grain colonizing for my LAGM '25.

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Huskies said:

I understand that wild genes might have a bunch of variables in potency/yield that make them discouraging compared to a commercial one, but I'm very interested in seeing what happens when that gene pool gets revitalized. Maybe its best of both worlds?

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