Currently working on trichoderma spp., but getting only spores in media. How to grow and observe trichoderma mycelium in PDA or other culture media. Kindly help.
Your question is a bit unclear. You mention specifically PDA (potato dextrose agar) - which suggests you are trying to grow Trichoderma on agar-solidified medium, not in liquid medium. So is your problem that it is sporulating on the agar plates and you would like just mycelium? In that case, keep the plates completely in the dark. Not even a crack of light until you are ready to use the mycelium. Trichoderma requires light to sporulate. Alternatively, you could also use a medium on which it doesn't sporulate well (like plate count agar) - doesn't give great growth, but also doesn't sporulate.
However, if your question is how to get spores to germinate to make mycelia, that is a different question and we would need to know more about your set up.
And if you are wanting to grow Trichoderma as mycelia in liquid medium - step one will of course be to stop adding agar to your medium. Having enough spores to generate good growth is also important and of course the particular strain and species may be important in determining whether you get pellets or mycelium in liquid. If you are then seeing sporulation in liquid medium, more information would again be needed. But the first suggestion would be to harvest the mycelia before they sporulate. That is, make sure they have enough carbohydrate to form a decent amount of mycelium and harvest them before it is all consumed. Too much carbohydrate and the cultures will probably become oxygen limited (assuming you are using flasks) and that is also not good, so be reasonable and also check literature. If you want stationary phase biomass, you need to be aware that sporulation is part of stationary phase for fungi like Trichoderma.
Hope that gives you some ideas.
@marilyn wiebe.. thank you for the suggestion. It is useful.
And my question is that I am getting spores of Trichoderma spp., but actually I need mycelial growth of the fungus to do the microscopy for cultural variation study of different Trichoderma isolates.
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