Pluteus cystidia

[martincito]

I've spent so much time trying to get good images of flies that I have rather neglected the microscope, until today, when I found a group of Pluteus mushrooms growing on a tree stump in the park.

The cystidia at the gill edge of these mushrooms have a distinctive horned or hooked apex. A piece of fresh gill was placed on a slide under a cover slip and then photographed. 45 shots taken with a 3.0 Megapixel Digital Microscope Eyepiece camera in place of the normal eyepiece of a Lomo BIMAN R13 microscope using the Lomo 25x objective and changing the focus manually by small increments. The images were then combined using ZS PMax.



Comments (however critical) would be very much appreciated.

Martin

[Wes]

Did you treat your specimen with any chemicals? I've never done it but I've read that people use KOH to facilitate better observation of mushroom tissues.

[martincito]

Did you treat your specimen with any chemicals? I've never done it but I've read that people use KOH to facilitate better observation of mushroom tissues.

This piece of gill was photographed in air. It is true that a more usual approach would be to examine the specimen immersed in liquid, either water or KOH solution, and to stain the tissue to reveal its structure more clearly.

Regards,
Martin

[martincito]

Here is an image of some of the cystidia photographed in KOH solution after staining with Congo Red. I think I prefer how they look in air...



Regards,
Martin

[Wes]

How concentrated was your Congo Red solution?

[martincito]

How concentrated was your Congo Red solution?

It was 3% aqueous solution when I bought it a year or so ago. I immersed the gill section in it for a few minutes, then washed most of it out with a drop or two of distilled water and 10% KOH.