Myc Zine
Archive
Take pictures of everything you do, said Miga. But my phone cam was broken. Instead i took this picture with my analogue „exacta135“. That day we cooked medium for euglena and amoeba, but i´d got a very bad cold, my nose was running away and i was afraid of contaminating everything just by breathing.
Infected by enthusiasm
I think the first courseday i really participated. I thought about not even going to the course. And than i met Azuzena in the M18 garden and realized that she was our teacher today. So i went. It was very interesting, Mycelium and slime molds are not as little as the other organisms. You don´t have to look through a microscope to see them. We could nearly touch them and smell them, imagine their consistence. You don´t need to have programming skills to do art-work with them. Azuzena showed us, what other people had already done. What stuck in my mind, was that you can heat mycelium and it will keep it´s form. For example in bricks or leatherlike fabric. Under the instructions of Azuzena, i inoculated my first medium with spores. It was 15 minutes boiled cardboard. The container we used to store it, was ironically a blue supermarket Champignon box. After the Inoculation, wich in this case only means, to put a peace of wood with spores in it, between two or three sheets of hot cardboard. With a layer of cling film we closed the container to prevent the inside from too much contamination, but than we poked holes with a fire-desinfected needle inside. Because the mycelium needs to breathe. And then leave it in the oven, that is not called oven. Jan and i had a competition who will do it better and grow it faster. Jan won, because he cared more, i was more fascinated by Azuzena and his enthusiasm about mycelium. Jan is convinced that mycelium grows better if you love it and you show your attention to it.
Media
Mycelium grows well in:
-PDY-agar (potatoestarch-dextrose-yeast)
-coffee mold
-wood
-cardboard (it is out of wood of course..)
-straw
Additionally it needs to be moistured regularly and grows best in a temperature between 22- 26° C. It needs also air to breathe, if you want it to crop and become fungi, it needs to be dominant over the other micro-organisms in its habit, and you have to rise the temperature i think.. I think some humans are similar to mycelium, i could live in the same way at least for some time i think.
31.10. Halloween.
Experiments
Motivated by the experiences in the last lesson, i started doing something at home.
This time i wanted to experiment with growing mycelium in coffee mold. I already had collected some for a time, because on my travels during the summer i had learned to use it instead of dish-soap. In addition i had plucked some fungi caps out of my garden, put them on a piece of paper and waited for them to drop their spores, facing their dead by drying out in my room. Azuzena told me that it could work like that. So i put on my new rollerskates and desinfected the whole kitchen with Korn, a typical thuringian alcohol. Then I boiled the coffee mold for 15 minutes, maybe longer and put it in a bowl to let it cool down . Then i desinfected an old paprika sauce glass with Korn and put the boiled mold inside rotatory with pieces of the dropped spores and tapped it with kitchen paper. In the end i heated my oven to 50 degrees, let it cool down and then stored the glass in it with circulating air. Later that day i went to the lab to put in in the real machine. There I met Azuzena and she told me that my first experiment actually grew better than Jans.But this was only in the first place.
Analysation of the human DNA by humans
We started a Analization of our DNA. Means: gargle a sodium solution and then pipet a lot. We follow the instruction. I think we seperated our DNA...
While a PCR machine redoubles a part of our DNA, marked by a primer. Julian Chollet explains us the process. At first the machine heats up the small Eppis, our DNA double Helix splits up. The primer adopts to a special sequence, on each side one.
„A primer is a short strand of RNA or DNA (generally about 18-22 bases) that serves as a starting point for DNA synthesis. It is required for DNA replication because the enzymes that catalyze this process, DNA polymerases, can only add new nucleotides to an existing strand of DNA. The polymerase starts replication at the 3'-end of the primer, and copies the opposite strand.” (Wikipedia). Yes and then it cools the Eppendorf test tubes down and the nucleotides can be added to the strand. And this happens a lot of times (30 more or less) until there is enough DNA to be analized. Only the sequence between the beginning and end primer is being redoubled, that makes diffrent DNA´s comparable. At least parts of it. I think Julian brought us the primer that is used to seperate the part of the Helix that stores the information about our regional origin.
We wanted to use gel electrophoresis to compare and analize our DNA, but it didn´t work. We don´t know why.
This is a photo of my last experiment, 1 week later:
I think it is contaminated, definetly too wet, says Miga. But how can you dry out coffee mold after cooking it (to get rid of contamination) without recontaminating it?
We have to present our ideas.
See my presentation: File:suna-mycelia-paper.pdf (click fast to animate it)
Well i had a lot of worries. And yes not everything is really working how i thought, but i am still in the process.
30.11.17
I met with Jan in the Lab, because he had a lot of PDA (Potatostarch-Dextrose-Agar) medium, he offered me to use for the first try. I don´t have Photos of that Day, but here is, what came out a week later:
This picture was my phone screen background, it took the same place as a beloved person.
5 days later, it was already contaminated (the little greenish dots) and began to roll up (in the upper right corner). Miga and Maike said, the experiment failed, it is too dry. So i cut a stripe of it to try out the ironing theory. Which i had already tried out with some dry mycelium Jan had gave me to experiment:
After cutting out the stripe, i folded the mycelium to the inside. Looks interesting, actually. And then I ironed it.
I didn´t want to throw away the rest of the culture, so i just cut out the contamination, to see if the mycelium survives or can take back the control.
I went to the Lab to make my own PDA-medium. To experiment more with mycelium and find out wich are the best conditions to grow it. Because i think for the paper production i need a lot more mycelium, i needs to be well moisture, for a stable growth, but nor to much medium, so that it can eat up the whole of it and i don´t have to dissolve the medium from the mycelium, because the water is not good for the mycelium either.
Therefore i cooked some old potatoes, and boiled them for maybe 20 minutes, than took them out of the water. Weighed the Agar and the Dextrose, and added them to the Starch- brew. It burned a little on the ground of the pot, because the sugar can´t get too hot.
Meanwhile i had cleaned the "Telstar" disinfected it and a lot of petridishes with alcohol and UV-light. Prepared everything to be ready for the medium. I filled them and let them cool down with the fan for some minutes. I waited.
And cut out mycelium from my last experiment with a knife, disinfected with fire. With those mycelium pieces, i inoculated the PDA-medium filled petridishes. I wanted to do each in a different way, to see how i can achive the best result to produce paper from it. Therefore i varied the amount of medium and sometimes put the mycelium upside down in the medium. Additionally i wanted to know if the mycelium maybe grows better in the closet than in the oven. So i put of every kind one in the oven and one in the closet to make it comparable and marked it as you can see in the gallery below:
This is what you could see 5 Days later:
And here again, to compare how the growth differs from oven to closet:
I thought, now its proven: the closet is better than the oven! But Maike said, maybe the process in the oven is just fastened and the contamination sleeps in the closet-petridishes as well. So i decided to wait one more week. To see what happens.
One week later was the 28.12.17. I was in YMR for exactly 1 Day, and although i borrowed the key from Tseh, i couldn´t enter the BioLab because the whole building was closed and the Thoska didn´t work.
10.01.2018
I just took pictures of the petridishes:
