| MadSci Network: Other |
Amanda was right; mold will not grow as well on bread containing preservatives as on unpreserved bread (that's why they call them preservatives - they preserve the bread from getting moldy). A good test of this would be to buy some white Bunny Bread® (or Wonder® or something equivalent) and get some homemade white bread, and compare the growth of the same mold on each. It's best if you get the mold from another moldy piece of bread, so that the variable growth rates of different molds isn't a factor. From my own personal observations, homemade bread gets stale much faster than the store-bought stuff. Remember, molds eat most of the same things as animals, so if wheat or rye bread is more nutritious to us, then it's probably more nutritious to the mold.
The conditions for your experiment should be fine for growing most bread molds. Just be careful if you open the moldy bread bag, since many of the molds you may grow could be airborne allergens. There are several common molds that will grow on bread; most of them look different to the naked eye, but to really know what molds you've grown, you need to look at them under a microscope. For more information on molds, there are plenty of links at the Mycology Resources page. Good luck with your fungi.