The spores that I harvested are either not mature or dormant. How can we differentiate between dormant and alive spores? Maybe looking at the movement in oomycetes. How do we sort them?
What kind of spore? Conidium? Oospore? Chlamydospore? I will give you a different answer in each case. There are a number of vital stains that sometimes work, but you need to test them in your situation. One of the cheapest and most accurate methods is to put the spores in a 4 M NaCl solution: if the cytoplasm plasmolyzes, the spore was alive.
Dr. Shishkoff. Thank you for your kind reply. For fungi I am intrested jn sorting out the conidia. Zoospores in case of oomycetes. What could be the best stains to use? I dont want to kill the alive spores. Moreover, I am also looking for ways to sort live and dormant ones. Is there any protocol to break dormancy ?
Dear, Bhawana,
Good evening,
You can put them in NaCl solution with a concentration of about 4 M.
With regards.
You can prepare a water culture for the fungus and when it grows and produces mycelium, you must transfer it to a suitable solid medium and incubate it at 25 C for 3-4 days to allow well growing. After that you can prepare slides and identify it according to a suitable key.
Some Oomycetes fungi like Pythium which belongs to the order Pythiales, the water culture is very effective to isolate it from the infected plant roots.
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