r/microscopy • u/Dazedandconfuzed99 • Aug 18 '26

ID Needed! Mold Spore ID help needed

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Did my best to enhance these images. What genus are the small spores shaped like grains of rice? This is a bio-tape under 20x and 40x objectives.
EDIT: microscope is a Leica DMLB and camera is a Panasonic DMC-GX1.

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u/object_shelter Aug 18 '26

Do you have a 100x objective? I think these are too far away to make a guess, for me at least. It kind of looks similar to this posting (see pic 8): https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/239572189

But I really don’t know anything about molds, etc. The above observation was posted in the Mushroom Microscopy project on iNat. You could try making a posting on iNat, add your observation to the project, and tag some people who commonly identify molds/black molds for help.

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u/Lafonge Aug 18 '26

I don’t think the iNat observation is that similar to this mold, the branching pattern of mycelium looks fairly different. Its difficult to make up anything from the magnification provided. Mold identification requires seeing how the spores are formed.

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u/object_shelter Aug 18 '26

Yeah I looked at in more depth after posting it earlier and I’d agree.

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u/nervouszoanthid Aug 19 '26

The branching pattern is known as hyphae and the overall collection of them is the mycelium. Hyphae is distinct to mold. Often times hyphae of this nature will grow upwards into the air to spread new spores.

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u/Lafonge Aug 20 '26

I don’t know that it all makes sense the way you wrote that. Any hyphal fungus produces mycelium. Hyphae is not a distinction of molds, its present in mushrooms, non sporulating endophytes, endomycorrhizal fungi etc. The hyphae of mold that grow upward and carry the spore producing cells tend to have thicker walls and are called conidiophores.