Cellophane on agar plate for fungi - (Jul/31/2012 )

Hi guys,

Reading an article from Fomina et al. (2007)* I found a technique I could find to be quite old but I didn't know. The technique consists in placing a piece/disk of cellophane directly on the agar surface which allows the fungi to access to the nutrients but avoids the hyphae to penetrate the agar, allowing to remove all the fungal biomass whenever you want. It is quite useful for biomass harvesting, biochemical profiling of single species, selecting during isolation on base to certain metabolic activity,...

Most of the new references don't give a proper reference of this cellophane sheets and the old ones refer to discontinued products. Many of these products can have hydrophobic coatings or other treatments that may turn them unusable for this technique. So, I was wondering if anybody has ever used this technique and could give me some orientation.

Thanks!



*Fomina, M., Charnock, J. M., Hillier, S., Alvarez, R. & Gadd, G. M. (2007). Fungal transformations of uranium oxides. Environ Microbiol 9, 1696–1710.

Old fashioned cellophane is still sold for preserving PAGE gels by drying them between cellophane sheets. You can buy it cut to fit common gel sizes for that application. I would imagine it would work for your application as well.