April 2

I spent the day in the lab, making regrind of P. ostreatus for my current experiment.  It turns out the P. citrinopileatus  (golden) didn't grow well enough in the grain bag to continue with the experiment.  We have to now order the two oyster species, the pink and golden oysters.  The two mushroom species probably failed to grow properly due to the way the strains were packaged.  Hopefully our next order will work.
Also, we decided that we wouldn't perform the experiment I designed dealing with the black mold and mycoremediation.  With the mold, it is possible to contaminate the lab, even using proper aseptic tools.  We don't want to risk that, and the main idea was to gain experience in designing an experiment.  I also learned a lot from this experiment I designed.  Not only how to design experiments but how to research information effectively, on top of learning about other peoples' research.  I found a lot of unexpected information that improved my understanding of mushrooms in the bigger health picture.  
I really liked this method of learning, so I am going to continue doing outside research to perform a smaller experiment.  I'm interested in maybe reading up more about hormones and more structural components of mushrooms.

Beneath is also a picture of a block Sarah gave me to grow.  This block has to examples of contamination on it.  The obvious one being in the very center is mold.  At the far right corner you see Rhizopus which is a type of parasitic fungi.  It can be deceiving at first because it is white and fluffy like regular mycelium.  However, as it grows you begin to see dark specks in the white, fluffiness.  
Surprisingly, this block did produce some fruiting bodies, but their wet weights were small.