You mean you have frozen and thawed mycelium multiple times or is this just a hypothesis?
Yes , and yes.
I have indeed had jars of grain (particularly popcorn) outside , because they had cobweb , or some other contam or worry , and I had set them outside. Then before I could clean them up winter would creep in. I'm talking jars with their lid and even without. The next spring , 5 months later , I'd see the same jars that I had counted out for dead were brilliant white with mycelium . What's that ? You say even open jars of colonized grain can survive a harsh winter outside , unprotected .... yes , its true , I've seen it several times with my own eyes.
This is what I call observational mycology. Watch it and see what it does. This is what I do.
This anecdotal evidence tells me that quickly frozen mycelium-water jugs should work good , because I've seen mycelium survive constant thawing and freezing in harsh Canadian winter scenerio and still be viable. What I'm attempting to do is create inventions/innovations within a thread , whereby I go with an idea past the "O th" degree , pushing the envelope , while obviously absorbing ideas from others and incorporating them. The idea that say , that agar slants can be frozen and thawed is common knowledge , but to have the mycelium frozen alone in water is a variation on the idea that spawned this idea. This idea of "super inoculation" by flooding the jars with myc-water and draining them into more jars and so on and then saving the leftover end-result in the freezer for future projects is an on-going beta tek that is rolling around in my head , but what i like about it is ... get the idea in the morning during an on-going project and try it that evening in real time.
I have not done any agar work yet but your thread has inspired me to try.
This is only my second venture into agar ... I'm having fun though , and I noticed that there is a new brand of agar that sells in my local health-food store in 60 gram plastic pill bottles for under 10 bucks. This means several months of easy to make agar recipes in one bottle , especially if you consider expanding your spawn as I lay out in this thread.
What I'm working in on as we speak is a mycelium milker. This is equipment to aid in the pulling of mycelium out of the colonized grain jars that is as sterile wherever and whenever it can be. The idea I'm working towards is growing the mycelium-mother jars ... milking them of their myc and flooding other jars of sterilized grain , beyond the 10 CC that I've seen as successful , I'm talking flooding the whole jar , rolling it around , passing it on to as many other jars as desired and draining it well to collect the extra inoculant , then storing it.
I'll make a nice update tomorrow with the details and pics.
Edited by hyphaenation, 03 January 2013 - 02:32 AM.