SAB = Still Air Box
You do not need a laminar flow hood (so affectionately called a whatchamacallit filter vent/workspace). You can do just about everything in a SAB just fine, and I highly recommend everyone that's interested in mycology start there. If you can pour agar and not get contamination, you have clean enough technique to do just about anything else.
A laminar flowhood isn't a magic bullet. If you have poor aseptic technique, you'll still have problems. I digress.
A SAB is your entry point. here's a simple tek for making spore prints.
Materials needed:
- A box of ziplock sandwich bags
- 2" x 2" aluminum foil squares
- Thumb tacks -- the kind that have that plastic handle bit, not the flat ones
- Fresh, sporulating mushrooms. keep the stems attached for now
- A fresh razor blade -- the kind for box cutters, not a shaving blade
- Ozium (not lysol)
Process:
1. Wipe everything (aside from the mushroom caps) down with ISO and load into your SAB. Do NOT open the sandwich bags, just wipe down the outside.
2. Load your mushrooms into the SAB
3. Bomb the SAB and the room the SAB is in with Ozium
4. let the shit settle for 15 minutes
5. Dawn your gloves, rinse your gloved hands and forearms with ISO
6. Take a mushroom, cut the stem as close to the gills as you can
7. Stick a thumbtack in the top of the cap
8. Set the cap gills down on a piece of foil
9. Slide the foil with the cap into a ziplock bag
10. Clean the razor blade
11. Repeat steps 6 - 10 for all caps
12. Leave the bags in the SAB for two to three days
13. After a few days, come back, don gloves, repeat ISO wash on hands and forearms, and remove caps. Seal bags.
You've made spore prints. You should NOT move to a MS syringe from these prints. Agar work from print is damn near mandatory. Are spore syringes a thing? yes. should they be used to inoculate LC or grain? No. Does it work? yes. but, you stand a high chance of contamination.
