What is a spore syringe?

Hello! We get asked a lot of the same questions at MycoPunks HQ, because every week there are loads of new people finding out what a great hobby growing mushrooms at home is. Glad to have you on board, and yes, you’re right, it’s an excellent hobby. Food, fun, the satisfaction of growing your own supplies, it’s a fuck of a thing. 

We thought we’d do a few articles on some of the more common questions we get asked. This might take a little while, because we’re going to use actual knowledge that we have in our heads, and not just type into Chat GPT “1000 words on anything you like to do with mushrooms please don’t worry if it makes sense” like a lot of people seem to be doing these days.

So, what exactly is a spore syringe?

It is this: 

• One sterile syringe, usually the 10cc type (you can get smaller or larger but they’re fairly pointless for reasons that will be explained).
• Around 11-12cc of sterilised, distilled water. Spore vendors use this to ensure there’s absolutely nothing else in the water that could contaminate the product. There’s usually a bit more liquid in than what the syringe is marked up to, because it’s easier to draw the plunger up until it stops.
• Tens to hundreds of thousands of spores - why so many? Again, we’ll explain in a bit.
• A sterile luer lock on the end to keep it all in.

And that’s it, that’s all that’s in there, but that’s all the genetics you need to grow an infinite amount of mushrooms. 

Simple version: In order for you to start growing some nice mycelium, you need a grand total of two spores to meet up. Two. It’s like when your cat ran off and then came back acting all weird and then a while later hid under the chair and fired a load of kittens out of her tuppence. 

More accurate version: Each spore will, with the right conditions, germinate into what’s called a monokaryotic mycelium. For the sake of this analogy, this is like your cat. Your cat cannot fire kittens out of its tuppence without finding another nice cat to do cat stuff with. So you need another monokaryotic mycelium to meet up with this metaphorical cat and then the magic happens. The resulting mycelium that forms from them joining up (which is now dikaryotic mycelium because it’s got two different bits of genetic material) is now capable of creating fruiting bodies (your mushrooms). Sex! Everything fucks. Even your gran. Especially your gran.

Again, it’s a shade more complex than that - two monokaryotic mycelium may not be compatible (and this is why you sometimes see different sectors on your agar plate), so in reality you’d need a few more than two spores to allow them to find a match, but they’re not particularly choosy. It’s not Lady and The Tramp, it’s more like “ten to two at the mycelium nightclub”. 

Spore vendors put heaps of spores into every syringe, way more than is realistically useful. This is because for all the science involved in the process, it’s still quite inexact. The spores need to be scraped from a print into a beaker of the sterilised distilled water, then homogenised using a magnetic stirrer, to ensure that the spores are thoroughly mixed through. Each spore print will contain millions and millions of spores; this is how you can see a dense black print that’s made of microscopic objects. It isn’t very simple to accurately measure this without risking contaminating the spores in some way, so in front of the flow unit they are scraped into the beaker, with a sterile scalpel, then drawn up into fresh sterile syringes. This is your ticket to the genetic lottery of mushrooms: there are billions upon billions of different spore hookups in your syringe, and each combo will be slightly different, just like each of those kittens that fell out of your cat.

This is why a 5cc syringe is, in our opinion, pointless - it’s a lot more work to produce these. Double the amount of labour to unwrap, place in stand, draw up, back in stand, then cap an entire beaker’s worth of spore solution. This means that the cost is going to be out of whack compared to if you just used what you liked from a 10cc then stored the rest in the fridge/swapped it with a mate (sharing genetics with friends is a pro tip). On the flip side, a 20cc syringe is pretty much only useful if you are in some kind of mad hurry and simply must inoculate everything immediately or the bus blows up. There’s plenty enough in one 10cc spore syringe - the only limiting factor is how you get these spores into your media.

This is what’s called a MSS, or “multi-spore syringe”. “Multi-spore” doesn’t mean that there are a variety of different phenotypes in there, it’s all from one mushroom type still, but you’ve got multiple spores. It’s almost the only way to legally sell psychedelic mushroom genetics in most countries, with the other being the actual spore prints themselves.

You could, theoretically, climb in a tiny submarine, shrink it using a shrinking machine and then get into a syringe, like in the 1980’s documentary Innerspace, then move the two spores into each other and play some Barry White through the submarine’s waterproof speakers (water carries sound waves really well so this idea is solid gold if any other investors are reading). This would get you mushrooms, as efficiently as possible. I went to Dragon’s Den with this idea and they called me “a fucking moron” and told me to “get the fuck out right now, security is coming”. Because of this, the tiny submarine/shrinking combo is off the table for now, and so you’ve got to distribute more spores than you technically need around your growing medium. This is why we recommend using different amounts of spore solution for different products - it’s not about the amount of spores, it’s about the distribution, and not over hydrating the media whilst you’re doing so (don’t add 20cc ever for the love of god unless you hate money).

The way that every spore syringe is prepared is using aseptic technique. It is not (and cannot be) sterile. The process is designed to not introduce any further contaminants, but it’s entirely possible that there are some already existing on the spores, because they came from the underside of a mushroom. You can’t sterilise this without wrecking the spores themselves. For the most part spore prints are fantastically clean (more so than you’d think given how mucky nature is), but there’s always the chance of a bit of dust floating inside the gill of a mushroom, the same way as there’s a chance of it floating inside your SAB. 

Practically, what does this mean? 

It means that anyone selling “isolated spore syringes” is giving you a bit of marketing guff. What are they isolating? It very literally doesn’t make any sense. You could sell liquid cultures that you’d isolated from a particularly big or quick growing mushroom using cloning or other techniques, but that’s not a spore syringe. Are they claiming they’ve isolated some spores or something? Two spores? Organically farmed spores with low food miles? We still don’t know what it’s even supposed to mean. It’s much the same for vendors trying to sell spore syringes where they have put “double the amount of spores in”. Absolutely pointless if you have half a clue about mycology. Every spore syringe will have tens if not hundreds of thousands of spores floating around in there, nicely homogenised, so that’s the sort of claim that’s either just preying on the ignorance of novice mycologists to sell a product, or written by someone who doesn’t actually know anything about the product they’re selling or what it is actually is.

It also means that when you buy a spore syringe, you are accepting the fact that you may run into issues. You’ve bought a few tens/hundreds of thousands of pieces of genetic material, for you to go to work on. That’s the product, you are now the owner of that nicely preserved bit of genetic material, what you do with it next is what the hobby’s about. People just injecting spores into growkits or liquid culture media can (and does) work a lot of the time, but is always going to be a gamble.

In an ideal world everyone would use agar, because that’s the “correct” method in as much as anything in this world can be correct, and you can do really amazing things with your genetics this way - cloning, cleaning up, selecting out what you think are the best bits, all this sort of stuff is fun, because you can actually have a direct and very quick impact on the genetic structure of your mushrooms. You can go out into nature and find a mushroom in the wild, bring it home, clean it up on agar, or you could go and buy a punnet of mushrooms you like the look of in the supermarket, bring it home, clone it, and grow your own that are literally genetically identical to the one you found in Aldi. Mycology is essentially Turbo Botany, like someone took a look at a garden centre and scoffed “I ain’t got time for that” and just sped the whole process up a shitload, and that’s why we love it. Well, that and getting to eat mushrooms whenever we like, that’s pretty cool too. 

So we hope that’s been enlightening for any newer mycologists out there - if you hit any road blocks, keep reading, and keep working on your techniques. Nothing’s a failure if you can learn something from it, and one day maybe you’ll be the one telling all your mates how to grow their own mushrooms!