Tutorials/Agar/Cloning from Tissue

A spore-started grow is a gamble: every spore is a new genetic combination, and you don't know which ones you'll get. Cloning skips the gamble. You take a piece of living tissue from a mushroom you liked and grow it out on agar. The result is genetically the same individual, so it will grow and fruit the same way.

Cloning is how you keep a great flush going: the biggest, fastest, best-looking mushroom in the tub becomes the start of your next one.

Picking the mushroom

The best candidates are:

• Young and firm, with the veil still intact. Older mushrooms are softer, wetter, and harder to clone cleanly.
• Healthy with no spots, slime, or bite marks.
• From a tub with no visible contamination.
• Your best one. Pick for the traits you want more of: size, speed, density, a heavy flush.

Method

You'll need agar plates, a scalpel, a flame source, alcohol, and a still air box or flow hood.

1. Harvest the mushroom and bring it straight to your workspace. Don't wash it.
2. Wipe the outside lightly with alcohol on a paper towel. You won't be using the outside, but this cuts down what you're bringing in.
3. Tear the mushroom open lengthwise with gloved hands rather than cutting it. Tearing exposes the inside without dragging a blade from the dirty outer surface across the clean interior.
4. Look at the exposed interior. The best tissue is in the center, where the stem meets the cap.
5. Flame the scalpel until it glows, let it cool for a few seconds, and cut a piece about the size of a grain of rice from the interior.
6. Lift a plate lid just enough, set the tissue in the center, and close it. Flame the scalpel again before each new piece.
7. Do 3–5 plates per mushroom. Some will contaminate; you only need one clean one.
8. Label each plate: strain, "clone," and the date.

What to expect

• White mycelium should start growing out of the tissue in 2–7 days.
• Plates where the tissue grows out cleanly in all directions are your keepers.
• If a plate grows mold or bacteria around the tissue, transfer a wedge of clean mycelium away from it as soon as you can.
• Transfer from the leading edge to a fresh plate once or twice to make sure the culture is clean, the same way as isolating from spores.

Clones vs. spores

	Clone	Spores
Genetics	Same as the parent mushroom	New combinations every time
Predictability	High	Low
Speed	Fast; mycelium is already alive	Slow; spores have to germinate
Discovering new traits	No	Yes

Long-term notes

• Cultures can weaken over many generations of transfers and clones, a decline growers call senescence. Signs are slower growth, smaller flushes, and odd-looking mycelium.
• The fix is to keep an early, clean copy in long-term storage and restart from it, rather than cloning a clone of a clone indefinitely.