Breeding Mushrooms 🍄♥️ the sexy, new science coming straight outta’ our lab 🌙
Joey, our lab manager and myco-wizard, has been delving into the hardcore world of mushroom genetics and breeding with our UK native Lion’s Mane 🔬
So, how on earth does this work? We hear you ask…
Well, most of our mushrooms are dikaryon. Dikaryons are cells with two parent nuclei, happily paired, sharing hyphae, ready to be fed 🥰 (Netflix and chill kind of vibes).
Joey has been successfully isolating Lion’s Mane monokaryons — hyphae containing a single nucleus that are searching for a mate 😍 (Dating apps/on the prowl kind of vibes).
You can differentiate between the two by their growth strategies: one grows dead straight and the other winds around, branching across the agar plate.
Can you tell which is which in the photos? 🧐
This is very early days, but the aim is to start cross-breeding monokaryons and selecting for weird, wonderful, and desirable traits - with higher medicinal properties first on the list.
To be clear, there’s no genetic engineering here, just encouraging young lovers to come together and get weird and creative 🤩
Civilisations have been doing this for millennia: turning purple and white carrots orange, creating broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage from wild mustard, and making those UK strawberries so goddamn tasty 🍓 only difference being that we are breeding for maximum medicinal value rather than taste or appearance — and we’re only frickin’ doing it with fungi!
So many peculiar possibilities! We’ve been dreaming about black Lion’s Mane 🖤💭
What new fantastical fungi creatures would you like to see? 🥳
#BristolFungarium #BristolBorn #ScienceLed
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