After a faulty start, we're off!

Sometimes, you have to take risks.  Sometimes, those risks pay off.  Sometimes, they don't.  Oh boy.

We obtained two strains each of our two study species.  All were growing on petri dishes, except one of the strains of S. rugosoannulata was growing in a 5 lb. bag of sawdust.  This is called spawn; it's used to inoculate outdoor wood chip beds for mushroom cultivation.  

Since the spawn is made of lots of little bits of wood, there is more opportunity for contamination, compared to a very sterile petri dish.  Still, our spawn looked clean, and the strain growing on sawdust looked much more robust than the strain we had on the petri dish.  We decided to take a chance and use the sawdust spawn in our first attempt to inoculate wood blocks that will be used in our experiment.

 

This jar has growth medium along one length of it, and we inoculated it with the sawdust spawn.  The white growth is our S. rugosoannulata.  All of that green growth?  Contamination!  Your friendly neighborhood bread mold, Penicillium.  Bad news!

We scrapped the jars and re-did the process in 2 liter flasks, but this time, using our other strain.  We knew we were taking a risk with the spawn, and the re-do only set us back about a week.  And the flasks look great!

 

Our fungi are looking contaminant-free!  They will now colonize the growth medium in the bottom of the flasks, and after 2 weeks, we will add wood blocks for them to colonize.  The wood blocks will be used to introduce our fungi to the diesel-contaminated soil.  We're on our way!