Strain Maintainance

[watertrade]

Hi Guys,

I recently moved house and haven’t really had much time to take care of some of my mushroom cultures. I have a little collection of cultures that I would like to archive and store long term while I concentrate on just a few types. I will be storing them in distilled water once I get a few good agar plates growing.

I started to sort out the different Petri dishes and some of the cultures I have are pretty sad looking. I think I have back ups of most things in some form, syringe, agar etc.

Anyway my question is about strain health. Mainly sectoring, one of the cultures is sectoring on agar which I have never seem before on this particular culture. From what I have read this is a bad sign that pro mycological libraries start to get worried about(?). If this particular strain is on its way out, should I consider collecting spores and start getting back to some new strains…? Could I just culture up the best sectored bit?

If anyone has any tips I would like to hear them.

One tip I have is label everything.! I once could tell the difference between two very similar cultures.. now I’m not so good…

Cheers

Jim

[spiders]

depends on the species - what species is sectoring - something like a cube isnt a worry - you can just reisolate the good sectors.

[Rev]

fruit it and get one thats fertile and clone that fruit

that undoes 99% of all accumulated genetic damage

what u are doing is by natural slection eliminating all substrraisn that have lost the mechansims that enable the full lifecycle

its doesnt hurt to get new strains from spore at the same time but the enokitake we know today was alsmots exlusivley created by clonal selection from the wild type and not from spores

so stamets P system is only half valid - true for subcluturing plates but not if you complete the lifecycle and clone fertile fruitbodies