Kaleidoscope of yogurt fungus!!

Dec 18, 2014 • 1:49 AM UTC

South Beach, San Francisco, CA, USA

140x Magnification

Microorganisms

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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I often find rotting food; not just in my kitchen but also everywhere around. Often I throw it out as soon as I see it – not this time. I was surprised with the colors at first, and so I decided to dig a little deeper. Oh well, I was up for a surprise. See if you can identify each of the fungal spores I collected from the yogurt.
Methods:
1. I used a glass slide for this demo, since I knew I wanted clean images of the spores.
2. To get the spores on the slide, I gently brought the glass slide (cover slip actually) close to the growing fungus and made a small shake.. With a small cloud of spores I could see gently landing on the cover slip.
3. I mounted this on a glass slide; and used my 140x foldscope with an iPhone 5 for taking images.
Here is the result; a beautiful array of spores of all geometries. If you can identify the spores, leave a message below.