Spore powder print

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The prepared hat of a leaf mushroom (lower half of the picture) left a brown spore powder imprint (upper half of the picture).

A spore print is in the Mycology a conventional so-called discharge preparation. In the case of large mushrooms, this allows the color of the spore powder to be determined on the basis of ripe fruiting bodies - a characteristic that is often relevant for determination. For this purpose, the spores secreted by the fruit layer are caught with a suitable mat.

Procedure

A spore powder imprint requires a white or - if there is a suspicion of a white or very light spore powder color - a contrasting sheet of paper as a base. The fragments of the fruiting body are positioned on this. The fruit layer should ideally point downwards so that the spores can fall out unhindered. In the case of fruit bodies that are divided into a hat and a stem, the stem is simply removed and the hat with the lamellae , tubes, etc. pointing downwards , is placed on the surface. A sufficiently large glass or other suitable vessel should then be placed over the preparation to prevent the spores from being blown away and, above all, from drying out. To be on the safe side, the cover can be swiveled out beforehand with water to ensure a moist microclimate.

Ideally, enough spore powder will have collected on the surface after a few hours. To correctly assess the color of the spore powder, it is advisable to pile up the powder with a razor blade or another suitable instrument and to flatten it a little. This ensures that the base does not shine through and falsify the color.

Micro-preparation

The method is also suitable for the production of a preparation for microscopic analysis . Because, unlike a squeeze preparation , the spore powder only contains ripe spores. Immature spores, on the other hand, can deviate from the norm in terms of their characteristics (e.g. dimensions and ornamentation ) and thus cause incorrect determinations.

If a glass plate is used as a base, the spores can later be transferred more easily to the final carrier - if you use a slide directly to collect the spores, you can even save the transfer completely.

literature

  • Joachim Schliemann: Fixation and conservation of the spore powder imprint of hat mushrooms. In: Swiss journal for mushroom science. Vol. 41, No. 4, 1963, ISSN  0373-2959 , pp. 56-57.

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