Bonjourno, motherfuckos. In a similar vein to last time’s bit of blog-writing, we’re going to try and answer another one of life’s greatest mysteries: “why aren’t more people just embracing using agar?”. If you’re already Stametsing your way around the world of mycology (and patents haha) then this is probably just going to be teaching you to suck eggs, but if you’re now scratching your head and saying “what the fuck is a Stamets” then it’s probably worth reading a bit more. It got a bit long for a blog post as there’s a fair bit to address, so we’ve split it into two parts.

One of the main things that has always confused us is that a lot of people are happy not knowing about the basic mechanics of mycology, and it’s often counter-productive. They want mushrooms, the same as us, so they hit the “mushroom button”, which most of the time will produce mushrooms, and as long as it does then they’re happy. However, when it goes wrong, they’re then really unhappy, because they get no mushrooms. There’s this tendency to rush things, and to take shortcuts, because “it’s always worked so far”, and then inevitably at some point the gamble fails, and then potentially months of work goes in the bin and everyone’s sad. Absolutely zero shade being thrown on new guys here, mycology is for everyone, it’s just frustrating to see people lose all their hard work when they don't need to!

One single bit of extra learning could’ve saved their bacon, and made sure that mushrooms were on the table too.

Fuckin’ agar, guys. 

Agar’s your multi-tool. This is some of the sort of stuff you can easily do with agar:

• Harvest and clean up genetic material from mushrooms you’ve picked from outside
• Literally clone your favourite mushroom so you can have mycelium with those specific genetics
• Buy supermarket mushrooms you like the look of and clone them
• Guarantee a spore syringe is clean before use
• Clean up the mycelium if it’s not so it’s still good
• Create guaranteed clean liquid cultures
• Refine your mycelium so that it’s fast/resilient/strong as fuck
• Create weird hybrid beasts (alright this one is less easy)
• Use spore swabs to have genetics from the weirder, low-spore mutants

Due to the absolutely amazing way that mushrooms will happily move back and forth between different lifecycle stages (again, this is hugely simplified because we skipped science school to go and pick mushrooms), you can essentially take any part of a mushroom and go back to the mycelium, and then run it all the way back to the mushroom (and then back again if you like). Maybe harvest some spores, take a biopsy from the inside of the mushroom, do some cloning, mycelium again, back to mushroom, on so on and so forth for quite a long time before your mycelium says “I am old now, it’s time to let me go” and gets sent to the farm where your childhood dog went (or buried in the garden, just like your childhoo… uhh, never mind). Because of this bizarre ability to hop back and forth between lifecycle stages, mushrooms have a huge synergy with the use of agar. You almost couldn’t design a better combination of separate elements (that would have almost zero chance of crossover in nature) than mushrooms and agar if you tried.

How does this stuff work? It’s pretty cool, really. Agar’s made from seaweed, and when prepared, it acts sort of like a plant-based gelatin, although you need to boil it to get it to dissolve nicely unlike animal gelatin which would just need a nice warm soak. In the cell walls, there are a couple of nice cruelty-free gummy bits that need that heat to make them useful for our purposes. It’s used for cooking, it’s used in making paper, it’s incredibly versatile. For mycology though, we need it to be sterile (it would be awful if all your plates were already contaminated and you were trying to test things on them!), so it gets put through an autoclave or a pressure cooker at 121℃, which gets us what would be our base product.

Here’s the mycology-specific bit: we can alter this base product by adjusting nutrient levels before sterilising it to specialise it, if needed, like we’re tweaking our loadout on Helldivers 2. Put simply, we could:

• Add no nutrients - haha fuck all food for you! This is really good at trying to clean up a wild mushroom or something that you know will be heavily contaminated. The lack of nutrients will stop bacteria and other shit growing. Your mycelium will also struggle, but eventually you’ll see some, and you can cut out a nice clean bit and put it on some agar with more dinner in.
• Add some nutrients - normal dinner for normal things. Everything will grow at a normal rate. You’ll see any other contaminants appear if they’re present, you can grow lots of mycelium, you can remove bits you like and refine them on other plates, you can cut bits out and throw them into grain/liquid culture media, whatever. This is the equivalent of that Allen key you’ve got fifteen million of in the bottom drawer, it’s the standard.
• Add loads of nutrients - it is All-You-Can-Eat Buffet time and the doors are wide open. Everything that’s added will grow, rapidly, due to the massive amount of food available. This is really useful as a diagnostic tool, because if you’re not sure whether something’s a bit wonky or not, this will tell you, and quickly. It’s a bit less helpful if you want to transfer out as your mycelium will likely be slower than other contaminants so it might not have any time to claim any of the plate before it’s all taken up with whatever else was present.

You can even tweak this further by altering the type of nutrient source - some will be consumed more quickly by the mycelium, some are more complex sources of energy so will be consumed more slowly (allowing you to store them for a lot longer if you’ve got lots of projects on the go). We sell pretty much all of these agar variants: like a lot of our products, we use them extensively ourselves for our own mycology experiments so we need to keep a decent supply on hand. We’ve got no-added nutrient water agar, we’ve got the high-nutrient malt extract peptone agar (MEA+P), and we’ve got everything in between.

Next blog post is the second half of this: What will it contain? It’s the second half of this so it’ll be about agar. Cheers loves!