Learn How To Clone A Mushroom Easily | MyShrooms (2024)
What we mean when we refer to ‘cloning’ is not some complicated DNA procedure, but simply scraping tissue from a mushroom under sterile conditions, and then placing it onto sterile media to grow. Mushrooms are composed of mycelium, thus when we transfer a small piece of mushroom tissue to sterile media, we’re transferring live cells that will continue to divide, giving us in most instances, a perfect genetic copy of the original. Read on to find out how to clone a mushroom.
Firstly you will need to work under a still air box or in front of a Laminar Flow hood
Equipment :
Pre made MEA plates
Parafilm
Scalpel
Lighter
Alcohol
Gloves, mask, hairnet etc
Sanitise your work area with alcohol including your gloves, scalpel.
Take your sample mushroom that you would like to clone, if the sample is big enough I like to wipe down the outside with alcohol.
Tear your sample mushroom in half from the stem up (sometimes i use my scalpel to cut in a few mm so you can tear it more easily). Do not cut all the way through with the scalpel as you could transfer contamination from the outside into the area you will transfer from.
Flame your scalpel blade and let cool.
Choose a meaty part of the mushroom and cut out a small piece and transfer to your agar plate, this only needs to be a tiny amount of tissue (be careful if your mushroom has spores you want the flesh, not to transfer spores).
You may want to transfer multiple pieces from different areas to ensure success, flame your scalpel between each transfer.
Wrap your agar plate.
After a few days you should notice mycelium growing out from you mushroom tissue. After a week or two you should have decent growth. You may have picked up some contamination during this process (especially if you have tried to clone wild mushrooms) and doing multiple transfers is advisable. You should choose the healthiest, fastest growing mycelium and transfer each to multiple plates, eventually after around 3 transfers you should have clean mycelium that can be used to make grain spawn, liquid culture or for long term storage.
What Mushroom to Clone ? If for example you have grown from a spore print you would have mushrooms growing with multiple different genetics, you would want to choose the mushroom with the most preferable traits to clone. When cloning, select a young, rapidly growing fruit for best results. You want a fruit that is rapidly dividing cells, so it will take off quickly on agar. I prefer to clone from clusters, because they’ll tend to produce clusters on future flushes.
Similarly with wild mushrooms try choose a healthy still growing mushroom with rapidly dividing cells, try clone as soon as you can after picking.
Older sporulating mushrooms should be avoided if possible, firstly because the cells stop dividing at this stage and secondly you don’t want to introduce the possibility of transferring spores with the tissue to you agar plate.
This technique involves cutting off the bottom of a mushroom stem and placing it on a sterilized growth medium, such as grain or agar. The mycelium will grow from the stem butt, colonizing the medium and creating a new culture.
Only select the most vital and gratifying mushroom fruit bodies. If you are not able to make a clone immediately after picking the mushroom, keep it neatly stored in the refrigerator for max.48 hours.
Fruiting bodies are basically composed of compacted mycelium, thus flesh intended to clone can be taken from any part of the mushroom, but most suitable are interior parts of the upper stem and cap.
When two spores of the same species land close together in a favorable environment, they combine and make mycelium. This is a form of sexual reproduction, as each spore only contains half of the genetic material (similar to gametes) required to make a viable offspring.
Place tray under suitable lighting. Spray your cuttings with Clonex Mist every other day to ensure they don't dry out. Beyond that, leave the cuttings alone. Most plants will root in 7 – 10 days, but some could take up to 2 weeks or longer.
Yes, you can most definitely reuse mushroom grow kits! Mushroom grow kits are generally designed to give you more than one harvest depending on the species of mushroom inside your growing kit. There is enough water nutrition available in the substrate to give you multiple harvests over a period of 2-10 weeks.
As long as the plants are kept healthy, there's no real foreseeable limit to how long they can live and produce cuttings. Even when a clone is taken of a clone continuously, each subsequent clone should have the exact same genetic potential as the first.
Then you can combine the mycelia of two isolated hom*ogenous colonies and let their haploids fuse, mix, and produce a new genetic strain of mushrooms. Another simpler way to cross and mix spores, is to mix them within a test tube or syringe, and inoculate an agar petri dish with a high concentration of spores.
Log inoculation is a three step process. First a series of small holes are drilled into each log. Each hole is then tightly packed with spawn. Lastly, the surface of each hole is covered with wax to ensure optimal mycelium growing conditions and reduce contamination by other fungi species.
Abstract. Clonal reproduction is common in fungi and fungal-like organisms during epidemics and invasion events. The success of clonal fungi shaped systems for their classification and some pathogens are tacitly treated as asexual.
Introduction: My name is Lakeisha Bayer VM, I am a brainy, kind, enchanting, healthy, lovely, clean, witty person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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