Microscopic Plant Life: Looking at Molds Under the Microscope

What type of student microscope activity can be done on a cheap budget? There are many. All you need is a low price student microscope and some patience and practice. Let’s take looking at mold and fungi under the microscope for example. Students see these specimens everywhere without taking note of them at all. All the things required to grow are a dark place to stay in and a bit of moisture to keep them alive. Molds are fungi that you could find on things other than bread, like old fruit, books, all over the house and even old shoes if you leave them unused and unclean for long periods of time. Looking at a common bread mold under a compound light microscope will prove to be an interesting perspective on microscopic plants. Before you could begin with this simple student microscope activity, however, you will have to cultivate some mold on your own.

The most common environment for mold is old bread. Sprinkle some water from your fingers onto the bread and place it in a sealable jar. After you have sealed it inside the jar, put the whole thing inside a dark closet and wait for a day or two before checking it out. You’ll see cotton-like things on the bread after a couple of days. That growth is the common bread mold, which is usually white in color. Molds are a species of fungi that have multicellular filaments as opposed to yeast, which are single celled. In taxonomic grouping, the common bread mold belongs to the genus Rhizopus.

Now the student should take some bread mold with a pair of tweezers and mount it on a blank microscope slide. Make sure that you put a drop of water mixed with alcohol in your slide because using water alone for your wet mount will not make the image of the mold focus through your microscope lens. This is because molds are covered with a film that water alone can’t penetrate. In using water and alcohol in your wet mount, you will be able to focus the light better to make the image you will see under the student’s cheap light microscope clearer.

After you have prepared your slide, you could start looking at your mold sample under your student microscope. Looking through your light microscope, you could see very small, vine looking substances. Focus on a part where one of these filaments branch out until you come to a bulb filled with spores. This bulb is called sporangium and what it does is spread thousands of tiny spores around to propagate. Now look at the other end of the filament. Do you notice the root-like threads that branch out from the other side of the sporangium? That is the root system of the molds, and their job is to anchor the mold onto their environment and absorb all the nutrients they need to grow. Molds also work like vines since other filaments can start from this place where the root system and the sporangium meet. Runners from these filaments can begin away from the old mold colony or mycelium and start a new one, which in turn could start another one. Given the proper conditions, mold can cover the whole surface of what object it has taken root in. This gives an excellent source for kids and children alike to find interesting specimens to view for their science microscope activity.

Aside from the different types of mold forms, there are thousands of species of fungi as well. Learning some of their names might be something of a challenge that can be as interesting as looking at them under an optical microscope for kids. You can spend most of your life studying these kind of organisms and never run out of new things to learn about. We hope that students trying these microscope lessons will take interest in careers related to science, biology, and medicine.