November 13, Grain Inoculation

This meeting was spent signing a few papers and working in the lab and I worked with Sarah.  I now have my own Ecovative email and crocs to use in the lab. :)

In the lab, we focused on transferring the mycelium on the agar culture I created the previous week onto grain cultures.  I learned that using grain cultures is one of the most efficient ways for spawning.  Each individual grain provides more surface area for mycelium to grow on as well as provide nutrition.  Therefore, you can mass produce mycelium spawn.

Sarah and I used liquid inoculation techniques to transfer the mycelium.  This is a method where you combine  fragmented mushroom mycelium (agar mycelium broken down with blender) with sterile water.  That way when you pour this mixture into the grain, mycelium fragments are more evenly distributed.  Like all things concerning mushroom growth, contamination prevention was important.  Once again, I worked on my lab skills and being aware of contamination.  When the transfer was finished, we put the spawn to incubation.

Afterwards, Sarah briefly showed me the project she is currently working on.  She is trying to create a product that is a raise-it-yourself mushroom kit that uses old coffee grounds.

November 6th, Training Begins!

On Tuesday November 6th, we began my training process, so I worked with Courtney in the laboratory.  I began the first few steps to cultivating mushrooms.  The first step is preparation and pouring of agar media into petri dishes.  Agar media is essentially the food for the mushrooms (mycelium) that we cultivate.  Courtney prepared two agar medias ahead of time because it needed to be put into a pressure cooker for sterilization and prevention of contamination.  Then the majority of the time I spent pouring the agar into petri dishes.
This turned out to be the most difficult thing I had done the whole day, but considering it was my first time working in a laboratory and that I had no previous sense of contamination prevention, this was understandable.  I couldn't put my hand or clothing above any opening and I learned to organize my tools in a fashion that would make pouring agar into petri dishes efficient without contaminating them.  Afterwards, we cut out small squares of mycelium from another petri dish to put into my agar medias; thus began the growth of my mushrooms!
I never realized how critical sterilization and contamination prevention could be, especially after reading The Mushroom Cultivator I was was assigned.  It is critical to prevent contamination to produce a pure culture of mushrooms.  Next time I will continue the training process and learning to cultivate mushrooms.

October 30th

No Internship due to Sandy :(