Two weeks ago we began to grow our own shiitake mushrooms. We were given a mycelium log of which were watered every Monday and Wednesday. We covered the log immediately after watering to keep a moist and humid environment, which is the ideal growing condition for fruiting mushroom bodies. We would like to introduce you all to Mother.
Lentinus edodes, also known as the shiitake, is an edible mushroom which is grown and consumed commonly in East Asia. It is a member of Basidiomycota, and is considered a decomposer. It typically grows on decomposing deciduous trees such as the shii, chestnut, oak, maple, beech, sweetgum, and mulberry. Basidiomycota are defined as being mainly wood decomposers, however there are some which can be parasitic and can infect other plants and fungi. Asexual reproduction does occur in this type of fungi, however this stage is not as prevalent as it is in other fungi phyla. Most basidiomycota form mycelia and multicellular reproductive structures, but there are some which are unicellular. The name for the group comes from the basidia, which are club like cells where meiosis and spore formation occur.
Shiitakes have long been consumed by humans, with the earliest documented shiitake cultivation occurring around 1209 B.C. in the Southern Song Dynasty in China. These mushrooms were cultivated very simply by cutting down trees and placing them next to ones which were already growing shiitakes. These mushrooms were cultivated using only these traditional methods until 1982 when commercial methods were developed in the United States. Annually shiitakes make up 25% of the mushrooms cultivated worldwide, and are widely used in many different kinds of cuisines worldwide.
Classification Information
Kingdom: Fungi
Division: Basidiomycota
Class: Agaricomycetes
Order: Agaricales
Family: Marasmiaceae
Genus: Lentinula
Species: L. edodes
Fungi Culture Highlights
Day 0: On this day, we set up the shiitake mushroom kit. The preparation was quite simple in that we had to soak it in water for a couple of hours.
Day 2: Yasmin is now Mother's caretaker... she will have the duty of nourishing her. We are excited to see some brown caps!
Day 7: We were very surprised to find 10 mushrooms!!! WOW!
Day 9: Two more mushrooms have appeared and now brings the total to 12! We utilized the smallest mushroom to look at its gill and stems therefore bringing our mushroom count to 11.
Species: Shiitake Mushroom (Mother's) Stem
Magnification: 400x
Species: Shiitake Mushroom (Mother's) Gill
Magnification: 400x
Day 14: Our mushrooms are growing larger by the day! We have 11 mushrooms and hope to find more in the coming days.
Day 16: We're devastated to find our mushrooms in a very sad state. Unfortunately, we have lost all of our mushrooms. We did not have the opportunity to collect them during their prime.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiitake
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3435100716.html
Pilobolus crystallinus, known as the "Dung Cannon" or "Hat Thrower" fungus, are best known as fungi with an explosive spore dispersal. The photo to the right includes Pilobolus from our plate. The black spheres are sporangium that contain spores which are released after pressure builds in the vesicle. Due to the released pressure, sporangium can travel over 6 feet and able to accelerate up to 45 mph within its first millimeter of flight.
Other than pilobolus, we surprisingly found some other organisms on our plate. The yellow and white round dots seem to be a Staphylococcus species and the green fuzzy patch is a type of mold. It is also very interesting to note that there are several of our Pilobolous fruiting bodies that did not burst, and on top of that many of our pilobolous which did burst had very poor aim. The majority of our spores which were launched ended up in the cup, and were not shot up to the light. Given that we had many of our fruiting bodies which didn't burst, we can hypothesize that perhaps those that did burst were early given their poor aim.
In learning about these two different fungi in class, we can note some very interesting similarities and differences between them. Pilobolus belongs to phylum zygomycota, putting it in the same phyla as bread molds, while shiitake mushrooms belong to phylum basidiomycota which are the mushrooms that are consumed by humans. One interesting difference between them comes from their difference in their sexual life cycles. Zygomycetes spend the majority of their lives as haploid organisms, with their diploid and heterokaryotic states being very short lived. Basidiomycota, on the other hand, create fruting bodies while they are heterokaryotic, and have less of an emphasis on their haploid and diploid states in their life cycle. Both of these fungi are saprophytic, although they both decompose different materials and is a common theme for fungi with the vast majority of them being saprophytes.
Both of our cultures grew extremely well, but they both came with challenges. Our pilobolous grew very well, but many of ours did not burst giving us some inconsistent results. Perhaps in the future more time may be needed in order to see better results. As far as our results with Mother are concerned, we had some of the best mushroom growth out of the other logs that we had seen, but unfortunately our mushrooms were lost. We are unsure as to what happened, but we did find some mold in the bag covering with Mother which could be to blame, or we could have just waited too long to harvest our mushrooms and they had begun to wilt by the time we got to them.
Overall, both of these things were very interesting, and we really enjoyed having these projects to do. Taking care of Mother was a wonderful experience, and we hope to be able to revive her in the future and bring her back to her former glory. It's much more interesting to see real, living things in our lab sessions as opposed to things on slides, and it's refreshing to have things to actually do in lab that aren't just staring into a microscope. I would really enjoy getting to do these things again and see if we get different and/or better results.
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Pilobolus crystallinus, known as the "Dung Cannon" or "Hat Thrower" fungus, are best known as fungi with an explosive spore dispersal. The photo to the right includes Pilobolus from our plate. The black spheres are sporangium that contain spores which are released after pressure builds in the vesicle. Due to the released pressure, sporangium can travel over 6 feet and able to accelerate up to 45 mph within its first millimeter of flight.
Classification Information
Kingdom: Fungi
Division: Zygomycota
Class: Mucoromycotina
Order: Mucorales
Family: Pilobolaceae
Genus: Pilobolus
Species: P. crystallinus
Other than pilobolus, we surprisingly found some other organisms on our plate. The yellow and white round dots seem to be a Staphylococcus species and the green fuzzy patch is a type of mold. It is also very interesting to note that there are several of our Pilobolous fruiting bodies that did not burst, and on top of that many of our pilobolous which did burst had very poor aim. The majority of our spores which were launched ended up in the cup, and were not shot up to the light. Given that we had many of our fruiting bodies which didn't burst, we can hypothesize that perhaps those that did burst were early given their poor aim.
In learning about these two different fungi in class, we can note some very interesting similarities and differences between them. Pilobolus belongs to phylum zygomycota, putting it in the same phyla as bread molds, while shiitake mushrooms belong to phylum basidiomycota which are the mushrooms that are consumed by humans. One interesting difference between them comes from their difference in their sexual life cycles. Zygomycetes spend the majority of their lives as haploid organisms, with their diploid and heterokaryotic states being very short lived. Basidiomycota, on the other hand, create fruting bodies while they are heterokaryotic, and have less of an emphasis on their haploid and diploid states in their life cycle. Both of these fungi are saprophytic, although they both decompose different materials and is a common theme for fungi with the vast majority of them being saprophytes.
Both of our cultures grew extremely well, but they both came with challenges. Our pilobolous grew very well, but many of ours did not burst giving us some inconsistent results. Perhaps in the future more time may be needed in order to see better results. As far as our results with Mother are concerned, we had some of the best mushroom growth out of the other logs that we had seen, but unfortunately our mushrooms were lost. We are unsure as to what happened, but we did find some mold in the bag covering with Mother which could be to blame, or we could have just waited too long to harvest our mushrooms and they had begun to wilt by the time we got to them.
Overall, both of these things were very interesting, and we really enjoyed having these projects to do. Taking care of Mother was a wonderful experience, and we hope to be able to revive her in the future and bring her back to her former glory. It's much more interesting to see real, living things in our lab sessions as opposed to things on slides, and it's refreshing to have things to actually do in lab that aren't just staring into a microscope. I would really enjoy getting to do these things again and see if we get different and/or better results.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilobolus_crystallinus
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ReplyDeleteHey guys,
ReplyDeleteCouple things I really liked on your post. This topic for everyone is going to pretty similar but the fact that you added the fact, "Shiitakes have long been consumed by humans, with the earliest documented shiitake cultivation occurring around 1209 B.C. in the Southern Song Dynasty in China." Was really cool to me. Made it a little more relatable and I can see it goes back a long time. I also like the video link to the pilobulos slide pictures. You guys just went a little above and beyond. Really great job.
Tyler Klaudt
Thanks Tyler! I agree that this can be a little dry since we all did the same thing, so I'm glad you like the addition of some history in there. I know for me it's much more interesting to see that these things really do relate to the real world, and aren't just things that happen in a lab somewhere.
DeleteJessica U.
Hi guys,
ReplyDeleteAwesome post! I really liked your background info on the shiitake mushrooms and their history, which I found to be interesting! You guys did a great job of documenting your mushroom log and pilobolus cultures, so props for that! I also noticed that your shiitake mushrooms grew really high, in that the "stem" of your mushrooms were really long. Our group did not see this kind of growth in our shiitake mushrooms, so it was really cool to see another group's mushroom patch! Your mushrooms did seem to grow on one side for the most part, which we saw in our patch as well, and we still couldn't really determine the cause of this. Great post!
As always, you guys are super cool in telling the story. The thing I want to compare with you guys is the slide of stems and gills. They are so different from our mushroom. Maybe because we have different kind of mushroom so the slides look so different from each other. Our stem's slides are showing small teeny tiny over lap strings and they are transparent, but yours is big :))) And our gill's slides show that circle like dots and they are small and transparent as well. At last, your pictures of pilobolus is phenomenal, also include nice information. I like it a lot.
ReplyDeleteHey guys,
ReplyDeleteI loved this post! Our group grew the Shiitake mushroom, and I thought the growth of your groups' was interesting compared to the growth of ours. The stems on your mushrooms seemed to be longer, with a smaller fruiting body at the top of the stem. Our group had much shorter stems with broader fruiting bodies at the top. I thought it was interesting how you looked at which pilobolous ejected their spores and which did not. I did not think to observe that on our culture, I just assumed that they all had shot. Maybe this could be due to different stages of growth? If they didnt all start growing at exactly the same time, then they would not have ejected their spores in the same time frame either. It is just an idea! Great post!