02/23/2025
A short lecture on crossbreeding mushrooms
Mushrooms are neither plant nor animal, so how the heck do you breed mushrooms? Well, when a Mommy mushroom and Daddy mushroom love each other very much... 😉
Jokes aside, that is sorta kinda the way it works. Mushrooms can have many different sexes, some have over 17,000 (the person who flipped them over to check must have been maaaddd when they lost count). Whike it's less of a sexual nature (as we think of it), it still does involve two important parts: A monokaryon and a dikaryon.
What are those grossly scientific words? I'm glad you asked! Without being too much of a nerd here, you can think of them as a Mom & Dad. A dikaryon is the Mom, able to do the construction and find a way to make do with or without the supplies. Dikaryons are what fruit bodies, and all mycelium able to bear fruit, are.
A monokaryon on the other hand is more like the Dad, it can deliver some of the supplies but doesn't do the construction on it's own. They typically dont produce their own fruit, but can be mated with nearly any similar enough variety or species.
Why mono's are important
Monokaryons (monos for short) are absolutely required to breed your own brand new strains (we're not getting into the other method involving snake venom right now). Every new strain you see has had a mono isolated, verified under microscope, reverified many times, mated with a dikaryon, grown to fruition, isolated for desired traits, and grown & isolated several more times. Just like with our modern fruits & vegetables (and even livestock), select breeding for desired traits makes a better & stronger crop. Without cross & select breeding we wouldn't have the wide varieties of Brassica related vegetables we have today (broccoli, brussel sprouts, mustard greens, etc etc) that all cime from the same plant.
The other important bit about monos is that without knowlege and equipment, you very likely aren't going to culture one and then breed it by accident, those chances are astronomically low. And those with the knowledge and equipment usually don't want to give them up, and if they do they usually run $80-200 or sometimes more. Like most other people in the agriculture industry, breeders don't usually want to give their brood stock away unless they're totally done with it, because why would they willingly provide to potential competitors?
To me, that's hog wash (agriculture pun intended). Gatekeeping scienctific advancement for greed only can only set the whole world back, whether we know its full potential or not. That's why my partner and I have decided to release as many varieties as we have so far for considerably cheaper than normal, and offer as much help as possible along the way. This post isn't meant to be some hidden sales ad though (but if you're interested feel free to message, posts alone don't keep the lights on 😁). The goal is for more people to become interested, see what we can grow together, and hopefully help heal and feed the world as a community. We can do our part by sharing knowledge and making supplies readily available, and I hope the future mycologists will do the same for the good of humankind ❤️
