Summer Week 6

This week in lab I spent a lot of time staining the fungi that I've grown to identify morphology and hopefully the species.

I have been using lactophenol cotton blue dye in accordance with a protocol from Leck (1999). It is a relatively simple protocol, you basically just add dye to a sample on a slide, but I was really struggling with it. The samples of mycelium I was taking from my plates were too small at first, then they were too thick and only a small portion of the sample absorbed dye.

Finally, after much trail and error, I was able to get a sample clear enough to see structures. The trick was to use dissecting needles to tease out the mycelial mat and wait five min for the dye to absorb into the cell walls. I also discovered that the commassie blue dye works about as well as the lactophenol cotton blue and is a less toxic compound, so I may begin to use that more.


Preparation of Lactophenol Cotton Blue Slide Mounts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1706009/