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I am working on yeast mutant and I am observing their sporulation efficiency on agar plates. One of my plates got some dark green small fungus patches. I can't grow yeast again and dump this one with fungus because I am counting at a specific time interval to compare and it will take a lot of time to go through the entire process.
What should I do? Should I remove fungus from scalpel? And does this fungus going to affect the yeast growth?
Either you can cut out the fungus and get away with it, or the fungus will rapidly overgrow your plate regardless. You might as well try to cut out the fungus. If it overgrows your plate the experiment with that plate is done.
This is why you should have parallel plates for this sort of experiment. There is a saying: don't put all of your eggs in one basket. The reason is that if you sit on that basket all eggs are broken. If you are counting on just one plate for your experiment and you sit on it, or it gets overgrown with fungus you must start over.
The other reason to have several parallel plates going is that you can average the spore count. One plate might have more or less for some random reason, like fungus. But if you have several and average them out you will reduce noise.
