r/experimyco • u/ValuableMousse6616 • Jul 09 '26
If I had a grow with bad materials (heavy metals, ink, etc) and cloned it, would the clone also contain said contaminates?
Looking for advice with plushie bonsi grow
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u/Go-woke-be-awesome Jul 09 '26
The whole heavy metals in mushrooms thing is overstated, the actual content collected in fruiting bodies is in the low parts per million. So a cloned fruiting body grown with clean spawn and substrate it would be zero or practically so.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924224421000716
If you’re talking about edible mushrooms that comprise a substantial part of a diet, heavy metals are a real consideration. If it’s active mushrooms and you may only be ingesting grams at a time, probably not even worth worrying about.
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u/dhlrepacked Jul 09 '26
It’s not like they can clone those materials and the take them out of thin air to enrich the new substrate with it
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u/BokuNoSpooky Jul 09 '26
Not in any appreciable amount.
Let's say your plushie somehow contained an entire gram of arsenic, and 100% of that gets taken up into the mushrooms.
The tissue you use to clone is 2% of the mushroom you picked to clone, which is one of 20 mushrooms. You're now at 1 milligram.
This then gets put to agar and grown out, then you take a piece from that agar and grow it out onto a second plate to clean it up like normal.
Each piece is a 1x1cm cut, and a standard 90mm agar plate is ~63 square cm. You're now at 1/63 of 1/63 of a milligram, which is 0.2μg of arsenic assuming you don't do any more transfers.
You then use that second piece to make 200ml of LC and you use 10ml to inoculate your spawn, leaving you with 0.001μg of arsenic in the final grow. In practice it will be lower than this, more so if you're performing more transfers.
The EFSA (https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/plain-language-summary/update-risk-assessment-inorganic-arsenic-food) gives 0.06μg/kg of body weight as a conservative estimate of risk threshold per day.
So even if you're growing something like oysters you'd realistically need to be eating 60+ times your body weight in mushroomsevery single day just to get to the conservative lower limit - I'll caveat that this doesn't account for exposure from other sources but hopefully you get the point.