Trends in mushroom cultivation and breeding

Abstract

Mushrooms are highly nutritious and environment friendly crops that carry numerous medicinal benefits. The cultivation of edible mushrooms carries great relevance in todays' world in the context of a burgeoning population growth and extreme pressure on the environment. But advances in research on mushroom breeding and production is very limited as compared to other crops. This maybe partly due to a lack of previous knowledge of the genetics and breeding system in this crop. Classical breeding in mushrooms has been difficult due to the predominantly secondarily homothallic life cycle of this fungus. The cultivated strains thus display limited genetic variability. Also, developing an efficient genetic transformation technique and disease resistance is a challenging task in mushrooms. With the ongoing sequencing of the mushroom genome, knowledge of the gene organization and functions can be available and will help in developing better marker assisted selection breeding systems. This will lead to superior strains and along with an improvement in cultivation techniques, will pave the way for higher yield and quality.