I am a baby cultivator so please take what I say with a grain of salt, I still have much to learn myself and welcome any mycological gurus to pop in with their 2 cents c:

I personally love rye, practically everything I have tried on rye has responded well. That said, I also put my A. subru lc to rye about a week ago and still haven’t seen anything pop up. I have read that this species shouldn’t be refrigerated for long term stoage, but I didn’t give that tidbit much credit as I have heard the same about Pink Oyster and had zero issues bringing Pink out of cold storage. Thought this would be similar, but I might be wrong! I am going to keep the bag I inoculated and watch it to see if maybe it’s just slow to break out of dormancy. I also kept a grown out agar plate of this in my room-temp workspace on the off chance something like this happened, so gonna do some transfers, try to get another bangin plate, and make a fresh batch of lc out of that in case the cold storage did fuck up this batch of A. subru. Live and learn!

For your situation, it’s hard to say if it’s a bunk syringe or if it’s that A. subru truly can’t tolerate being fridged and you got a syringe that had been fridged (I am hoping that the latter isn’t the case, hoping I see some activity in my bag sometime soon!!). Fwiw, the culture from my post is from a syringe I got from The Mycelium Emporium, and it RIPPED out of the syringe, so I can highly recommend their product!

Thank you, I was so pleased to see this transfer grow out so vigorously, knew I had to share!

For starters, I do all my work under a laminar flow hood. This is from a liquid culture syringe, it took about two weeks for the first blob of mycelium to grow out on the agar and was a bit sporadic but with sections of nice rhizomorphic growth. Once I had enough good sections to choose from, I transferred a few wedges to fresh plates. From there it was about 12 days until I had the plate above, but it was very consistent growth across all transfers (took 3, this is just the one I ended up turning into LC).

For agar, I make my own using this video by Fungaia as a general recipe base. It’s more involved to make because it calls for more than just water/agar/sugar/peptone, but rather all that plus a mix of pulverised grains, straw, hardwoods, and other trace minerals. I strongly believe in it, though, I feel like the industry standard recipe for agar is easier to make but lacks complex nutrition. In the video, it is equated to a person drinking nothing but soda. Sure, there’s calories there that our bodies are capable of processing, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be healthy, especially when compared to a person eating full balanced meals.

For capturing and storing genetics, I like using a tube like this to drop some of the best agar wedges into, top that up with sterilized water, cap, wrap the cap with parafilm, then fridge.