Gigaspora albida

Preparing Clean Healthy Spores for Shipment

Heavily Parasitized Spores

These spores are so thoroughly colonized that they are uniformly black. Several of these spores in a population from which DNA is extracted will introduce considerable contamination. On the bright side, these parasitized spores are easy to detect and remove. When we find a culture in this state, we go through at least two propagation cycles using only washed spores as inoculum.

Cleaned Spores

These spores of been carefully picked from the culture containing parasitized spores. In this case, spores were extracted from almost half of the pot cultures to obtain the number depicted here (which then were used to inoculate roots of four sets of plants to revitalize the stock).