I've grown
tampanensis before and I've never heard of separating and isolating the "truffle" myc, but I am by no means an expert. All I did in the past was inoculate my grain jars from a syringe, let them colonize, and then left them alone for around 6 months until harvest. Yield was a bit on the low side but it was a great learning experience. While having experience with mushrooms in general, this was my first time with sclerotia.
I found out later that it is much more efficient to make a couple master jars, transfer to other jars via grain-to-grain, and then let them sit and grow. I am still having trouble understanding how anyone would be able to identify the difference between truffle mycelium growth and normal mycelium growth on agar with only the naked eye.
When doing agar to agar transfers in order to isolate, one typically looks for the strongest looking myc growth and transfers that over and over until they are satisfied that they have a strong growing isolate with no sectors. If that species of mushrooms produces philosopher stones, then it stands to reason that an isolate would grow well and still produce stones. After a few transfers, I would take the strongest and healthiest looking growth from your agar and use that for your LC.
It still seems strange that you didn't get any stones at all. How long did you let your jars sit before harvesting?
I think next time I grow truffles I am going to try MS syringe to agar, agar to agar transfers, agar to grain for G2G or GLC, and then make the rest of the jars from that.
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