Morels showing their iconic ‘ridge’ and or ‘cup’ shapes. Younger specimens were able to be extracted and viewed through a microscope.(above)
Young specimen showing the full morel structure. This is possibly the smallest morel ever identified and also ever recorded in lab settings.(above)
The morels could be seen with the naked eye. We had 2 successful medium create morels and one created dozens. These are about 10x or more the size of our previous trials.(above)
I am in full stage trials testing how I will develop the techniques, process, and so forth for lab settings to grow morels indoors.
Once the methods are complete with the particular species I will track back and test other morels for viability.
Strain was acquired through Penn State University mycology lab. This is important because we have a DNA verified morel strain.
Upon arrival we cloned it on agar media, and then also cloned it in a liquid culture.
Tissue containers and petri dishes were used in testing the first batch to test control/method.
3 out of 5 tissue containers showed signs of tiny ‘pin’ like structures right away even before fully colonization.
Single structure developing(petri dish). 30x magnification.Tiny morel mushrooms. Penn State culture + hypothesis. Tissue container.Single pin seen with cap/stalk connection. Under further magnification the ‘head’ structure showed ‘ribbing’ like formations.
Petri dishes showed signs of change but little to no ‘pin’ structures. The first photo is actually from a petri dish but that occasion was rare – the rest of the work was tissue culture containers.
New trials are underway to understand what may determine pinning IE ‘air’ ‘light’ ‘temp’ so forth and furthermore how we go about cultivating full size edible morels in a sterile procedure – if that is possible.
Further work is being done – we’re also cloning out a strain from Michigan State University labs. Both are the same strain of morel but I am doing this for redundancy and also to confirm my hypothesis.
Indoor morel cultivation is on the way and it may prove as a basis for further exploration in other fungi.
