Day 4 of growing Pleurotus ostreatus cultures from spore. Only one plate got contaminated, but it was bad. There are two contaminant fungi going to battle, and around three possible bacterial colonies. I must have been losing it at the end, haha! Can't wait to see how they progress!
From the left to the right (in the attached photo): two jars of Pleurotus ostreatus spores (now mycelium) growing in grain, two jars of P. ostreatus liquid culture cloned from agar, and two jars of Pleurotus pulmonarius liquid culture cloned from agar.
I also have five agar plates I inoculated with a different collection of P. ostreatus spores, but there's no visible growth yet--so I'll leave those out.
The P. pulmonarius was cloned from a fruiting body growing on a commercial grower's spent block that was salvaged from their waste pile. It's actually a pretty happy, and fast-growing variety. It seems that it hasn't reached senescence yet.
The P. ostreatus LC was cloned from a several-generations old sample that was initially from a liquid culture bought through amazon. It hasn't performed super well--which is why I've taken it to spore in two different experiments. I may end up disposing of this LC, but I'll probably store it in the fridge while I work on isolating some new strains from the spore experiments. Hopefully I'll win the P. ostreatus lottery...
All of this is just done in a simple Still Air Box, it's just a hobby for now. Some day I want to assemble a proper lab with a FFU/LFH, but that day is not today!
Anyone else culturing anything fun?
I hope the 3D Printing community welcomes other CNC tools. This is a project I made on my custom-built laser table, utilizing "Living Hinges" aka "Torsion Lattice Hinges". They're a really neat mechanism that allows for a variety of different arrays or "lattices" of shapes that facilitate bending--and of-course these can also be created with an FDM printer as well!
This particular lattice is a simple design, cut into a 5mm plywood, and the divisions are all 2mm. Due to the length of the torsion pattern and the space between adjacent parts, the lattice featured in this box is actually quite flexible--it's capable of about 180 degrees rotation before risking damage, so for a beveled corner, it works quite well!
Another cool thing about these lattices is that they are essentially springs! My next project is going to implement a shorter lattice that instead of bending perpendicular to the lattice's plane, will act as a spring along the horizontal axis of the plane. The forces won't be torquing around the vertical columns of the lattice, but rather pressing those columns until the gaps close, so the torque will be along vectors perpendicular to the lattice plane near the thicker connecting regions.
Over all these are really useful designs, and due to the near infinite ways they can be designed, they can both deform in very unique ways, and also scatter light in very unique ways.
Hope this has inspired some of you to explore these really cool mechanisms in your own work; and if you have used these before, let me know in the comments!
Oh that is very interesting! I guess the main way that they decompose is through PHA depolymerase--according to ChatGPT a lot of the species that have been tested in the decomposition of PHA are bacteria. It would be interesting to try inoculating some samples of PHA with different mushroom species as well. It would be really great if PHA could be fully-decomposed into proper food-safe compost.