Can anybody tell me how to work with perithecia? Maybe you can recommend literature about it?
Hi - it depends what maturation stage they are at and whether they are embedded in plant tissue or exposed on the surface. The more exposed they are the easier it its to pick them off with a needle and crush under a coverslip to view on a slide. They also have to be fully hydrated or they will be very tough to work with. If you are interested in the ascospores inside, you can place fragments of plant material they are in on a blob of vaseline on the underside of a Petri dish lid, mist with water and place the lid above a microscope slide. If the perithecia are mature, they should release ascospores down onto the slide. If the fruiting body is actually a pycnidium, you should just get conidia oozing from them and not actually released to fall onto the slide. It might be necessary to incubate the same material in different conditions or for different time periods of days or weeks until you get fully mature perithecia containing asci filled with 8 differentiated ascospores.
Best regards,
Jon
tissue sections by the paraffin method, will allow you to display morphological. this as a more specialized work.
best regards,
Beatriz
Anna, if you are interested in isolating individual ascospores, the easiest way I've found to do this is dissect out individual perithecia, crush in a small amount of sterile water in a microfuge tube, then dilution plate onto thin 2% water agar, using a spreader. In a day or so, they will germinate, and can be individually dissected off the agar, under a dissecting scope (with transillumination) onto something like MEA or PDA. I use a tiny needle called an insect minuten (BioQuip), fastened into a handle (x-acto, something with vise-like holder), to cut around the agar containing the germinating ascospore. You may find it necessary to briefly surface sterilize the perithecium, or you can simply add antibiotics (I use streptomycin and neomycin) to your agar.
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