I kept a Lion’s mane petri dish stored in the fridge for well over a year.
I decided to make an attempt at refreshing it by transferring into fresh petri dishes. After a week I noticed some strong mycelium growth.
After inoculating a grain jar with one of the cultures, I decided to have a look under the microscope to double check, just in case… And that’s when I noticed a morphology that I had never seen before. It looked nothing like Lion’s Mane. The full length of the mycelium is covered with these pegs with a sphere at the end.
After some searching, I am almost convinced that this is a Verticillium sp. - a new contaminant for me!
I then checked all of the petri dishes and they are all this same fungus. So, time to get a new fresh culture 😅
This looks more like Acremonium to me because the conidiogenous cells (the stalks producing droplets of spores at the tips) are very irregularly arranged. In Verticillium, the conidiogenous cells should be in whorls.
http://website.nbm-mnb.ca/mycologywebpages/Moulds/Acremonium.html
Hey, thanks a lot! I agree with your assessment.
I spent some time looking through pictures and these Verticillium photos were the best matches I could find:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Conidiophore-bearing-conidia-heads-A-and-microsclerotia-B-of-Verticillium-dahliae_fig1_228109106
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/tomatoverticilliumwilt-190413061822/85/Tomato-verticillium-wilt-8-320.jpg
http://ephytia.inra.fr/en/I/7133/Verticillium481
But that Acremonium certainly looks like an even better match. And you are completely right in pointing out that the arrangement seen in my image is irregular whereas the Verticillium images show a more regular symmetric relationship between the condiogenous cells (term of the day for me).
It’s easy to confuse the two because of how morphologically simple they are. Fun fact (or not depending on how much of a nerd you are), fungi that produce sticky droplets of spores on long stalks like this are often dispersed by arthropods, such as mites or springtails, which bump into the spore droplets as they walk along.
Certainly a fun fact 😄 Reminds me of the painful sandspurs that stick one’s feet while walking through the beach.