6 - Mushroom production – an economic measure in maintenance of food security

Summary

Introduction

Everyone wishes to remain healthy so as to work cheerfully and enjoy life to its fullest extent. A primary source for health support comes from food. For a long period of time, many fungi have been highly valued as food to fight against hunger, as a condiment to enrich the flavour of dishes and also as supplements to help maintain good health. These properties have made fungi even more popular in recent years, and this can be witnessed by the increasing demands for higher production volumes of many edible fungi in the local and international markets.

General biology of a mushroom

Life cycles A mushroom is the fruiting organ of a filamentous fungus which in most cases is a basidiomycete bearing the sexual cells, basidia, to carry out meiosis and dispersal of spores (Fig. 6.1). This filamentous fungus has a haploid form whose cells can be multinucleate (coenocytic), e.g. Agaricus bisporus (syn. A. brunnescens) and Volvariella volvacea, or uninucleate, e.g. Lentinula edodes (syn. Lentinus edodes) and Pleurotus ostreatus. Some mushrooms are self-fertile, e.g. A. bisporus and V. volvacea, while others are self-sterile but cross-fertile, e.g. L. edodes and P. ostreatus, and only after mating, fruit bodies called mushrooms are produced (Figs 6.2–6.5). For the latter species, there is usually a characteristic dikaryotic stage featured by a hyphal form with clamp connections at septa formed after mating (Fig. 6.1).

Fruiting Aggregation of the aerial hyphae by coiling and multiple forms of hyphal fusions turns a fungus into a three-dimensional ordered fruit body primordium (Figs 6.6 and 6.7).