Specimens like these pictured can have very few transparent spores, swabbing or live tissue cloning is really the only option.

Some strains that maybe hard to collect are P.E, A.P.E, A.M, KSSS, etc...

Always choose the cleanest specimens as you do not want to transfer any substrate, or organic materials to a swab, print or syringe.

After making prints I like to clean them with a sterile swab and some h2o2 cleaning the inside circle as well as around the perimeter of the print.

From prints you can make swabs or syringes or you can even directly scrape spore onto the grow medium.

When swabbing live fruit gills, use a lite touch and twirl the swab in between the gills. Try not to pickup any tissue and if you do try to twirl it some more and get it off...

Beautiful as they maybe....

Watch out for torn veil remnants as they can eventually contaminate your spore swabs and prints...

Silky and pretty and odd at times, watching the veil tear is pleasing to the eyes...

But... bad for our cultures! Don’t transfer veil or Gill pieces if you can help it...

Before using a swab I cut the stick as short as possible and then spray the entire stick with h2o2. Shake any drips off the swab before transfer...

If you like you can save the cut portions to use for something else...

It’s ok if the h2o2 gets on the tip though the wooden stick is the most important. Don’t let the tip soak in the solution however and quickly shake off any access before transfer...

Before swabbing the lamellar is pristine!

After it’s a mess!

Swabbing hard to collect strain can be a great tool in your Mycology know-how arsenal but another method is to start the spores on a small amount of grain first, and once that jar is colonized and before spawning to transfer some of the grains to agar in a G2A transfer, one of my most reliable tricks. You see with a swab or syringe the multispore is fiercely competing with each other, it maybe hard to segment rhizomorphic growth and can take many transfers to get a good stable culture. With the grains they are already established and have formed dikaroyotic mated pairs in a state of fusion called “anastomosis”. Until the two seperate strains mated they where monokarotic, monokaroyons are unable to fruit by themselves which is why we need two seperate monokaroyons to create a true sub species hybrid (more on that later) after all there is nothing wrong with leaving strains multi as many enjoy growing that way without ever feeling the need to isolate or segment and by doing G2G transfers you can increase stock exponentially; however, if you ever want to create good hybrids or isolated strains that come out all looking similar with big yield, then isolating on agar is the only way. And it’s a lot of fun too!

Here’s a live tissue clone from an in vitro fruit... Cloning is probably the easiest way to get as close as a mono culture from the get go, as you can see there are way less strains on this plate and the lower half that looks more tomantose is actually a single strain that can yet be mated... segmenting from here I can get a mono culture within 2 transfers...

And here are some grain to agar clones. These are still multi tho with a manageable amount of established dikaroyotic pairs that will fruit amazing as is... or we can segment and chase the elusive monoculture...

Here’s one from grains , another great example of how I get some of my best most reliable cultures. I see sticking out to the right a couple prime mono culture candidates...

The straw transfer trick is great for transferring perfect small round wedges... the big orange one from dunk n donuts work well...

First sanitize with Isopropyl alcohol...

Punch holes and then pick out with a pick tool...

Make sure to flame your tools before use....

New straw transfer complete!!!

After a day or two of growth...

Stay tuned for SporeLabs 103 where we will continue segmenting, also do agar to syringe tek as well as review the spore expander kit and work towards a collaboration effort. At least have some fun guys! Namaste!!!