by Shroom Rancher
Once you have genetics, what’s the best way to reproduce your mushroom strain?
Here are the 3 most popular methods:
1.) Spores
Mushroom sexual reproduction. Mushroom spores germinate and combine to make a new mycelium colony. Pictured is a spore print, but spores often come in a syringe of water. You can germinate spores into a liquid culture (LC) by putting them in a solution that contains sugar. Spores germinate in the sugary liquid, which grows faster when inoculated because the spores don’t have to germinate and find each other in the grain. Kind of like germinating seedlings before planting.
2.) Cloning
Take a piece of a desirable mushroom (stem or near gills) and let it grow in a substance like agar. The new mycelium contains only the genetics from that mushroom. This isolates desirable traits. Although it’s possible to isolate traits with spores, it’s much easier with cloning because every generation of spores creates an unpredictable mix of traits as opposed to a genetic copy. Cloning also lets growers identify and isolate the rhizomorphic mycelium (stringy bits) because it grows and fruits faster than tomatose (fuzzy) mycelium. The downside to cloning? Every generation loses part of the overall genetics from your original mycelium colony. A mushroom colony is made of many different mating types that form bonded pairs. Each “couple” has a job. If you take a clone of a clone of a clone, you will eventually lose the genetic variation for good mushroom growth. For example mycelium might stall, pins might not form, or mushrooms grow malformed. At that point, you have to cross back to an earlier culture or some other fresh genetics.
3.) Grain to grain (G2G) transfer
This is when you take colonized grain (spawn) and add it to new grain. The spawn will colonize the new grain, quickly giving you 10x the original amount of spawn. The purpose is to make a lots of spawn, fast. Only do this a few generations before fruiting or you’ll run into similar problems as cloning.
