FOAF has been doing some invitro experiments fruiting agar on the plate. This experiment has been going for a little over a 13 months now. Results are pretty darned interesting so far.
Agar recipe (measurements are by weight):
2% LME, 2% Dextrose, 1.5% Agar-agar (Sporeworks.com brand) in spring water.
Plates are sealed with a double layer of Parafilm and incubated at 84F.
The original idea was to try and get better multispore invitro results by collecting and germinating spores from successive generations of invitro grows. The plates below are 6th generation B+ and 3rd generation Tex.
The fruits are allowed to sporulate on the agar, without ever opening the plates. The spores are picked up by very lightly touching them with a sterile cotton swab. The swabs are put in small sterilized vials and then put in the freezer for 5 days.
5 days seems to work well to kill any errant mycelia that was picked up without killing too many of the spores. About 10% of the swabs don’t germinate at all..
After the 5 freezer days, spores are germinated by either rubbing fresh plates or dropping a swab into a 1/3 filled pint popcorn jar. Newly inoculated plates/jars are watched closely. If growth occurs before 2 days, it is probably a mycelia clone and not a germinating spore.
About six months ago, it was discovered that the invitro fruiting was more aggressive if two different strains were put on a plate simultaneously (both plates above are B+ on left, TX on right). This has not been experimented with except on agar, but it might do interesting things on a cake.
Full size invitro results with
Buckaroo Bulk Nuggets (Buckaroo Bulk Nugget Tek (invitro, spawn bags and/or ½ gallon jars)) have been excellent and seem to show distinct generational improvements in performance thus far.