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Genetic Diversity


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Hello everyone.  This is my first post so excuse me if I mess up protocol.  

If I take a biopsy from a mushroom and start a culture on a plate, then inoculate some liquid media to eventually onto fruiting substrate.  This mycelium is a clone from the initial mushroom correct?  Now if I get mushrooms fruiting from the substrate and take a spore print, how much genetic diversity from the original mushroom if any do I get from that?   

Thanks everyone!

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The mycelium and the mushrooms will have the same genome as the original cloned mushroom.  The spores produced by the mushrooms will also be based on the same genome and thus will not have any genetic diversity.  However, I don't know if all the spores contain the entire genome; they may contain only part of the original.  Genetic diversity will only occur after the hyphae (or other structures) from the spores mate with compatible structures from different mushrooms.  The mating methods vary among different species and may be quite complicated; some fungi can even mate with themselves.  The point is that the genome of any offspring of the cloned fungus will only be different from the original genome after mating with a different fungus has occured.

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Shiitake for instance, is it possible to inoculate sawdust with do different strains on rye, and the resulting mushrooms would be the result of a mating of the two?  Are there simpler methods for making/experimenting with new strains?

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2 hours ago, mattSH said:

Shiitake for instance, is it possible to inoculate sawdust with do different strains on rye, and the resulting mushrooms would be the result of a mating of the two?  Are there simpler methods for making/experimenting with new strains?

This sounds like the beginning of every Zombie movie......lol

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I'm no expert on breeding mushrooms; but, from what I've found on the Internet, I think that you would have to use spores to get crosses between different strains of Shiitakes.  You should be able to sprout the spores from two different strains in a petri dish and let the resulting hyphae mate to produce a new strain.  You should be able to find how to do this with a bit of Web searching.

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