Summer Week 9

This week in lab was spent learning to make microscope tape mounts. This is another, superior way of staining fungal cultures for investigation under the microscope.

When making a normal wet mount slide from a culture grown in a dish a researcher will scrape a small sample off the colony. Unfortunately this distorts the morphology of the mycelium, and bunches the sample into a mass, making observations fuzzy at best.

With tape mounts this frustration is eliminated. Instead of scraping the colony, a strip of tape is gently pressed against the top of the petri plate, preserving the shape of the specimen.

Here are some photos of a colony that was sporulating: