Evaluation of Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis among Germplasm of Agaricus bisporus by SSR Markers

Sexual spores in mushrooms: bioactive compounds, factors and molecular mechanisms of spore formation

Throughout the life cycle of mushrooms, countless spores are released from the fruiting bodies. The spores have significant implications in the food and medicine industries due to pharmacological effects attributed to their bioactive ingredients. Moreover, high concentration of mushroom spores can induce extrinsic allergic reactions in mushroom cultivation workers. Therefore, it is important to study the bioactive ingredients of medicinal mushroom spores and molecular mechanisms of spore formation to develop healthcare products utilizing medicinal mushroom spores and breed sporeless/low- or high-spore-producing strains. This review summarizes the bioactive compounds of mushroom spores, the influence factors and molecular mechanisms of spore formation. Many bioactive compounds extracted from mushroom spores have a wide range of pharmacological activities. Several exogenous factors such as temperature, humidity, light, nutrients, and culture matrix, and endogenous factors such as metabolism-related enzymes activities and expression levels of genes related to sporulation individually or in combination affect the formation, size, and discharge of spores. The future research directions are also discussed for supplying references to analyze the bioactive compounds of spores and the molecular mechanisms of spore formation in mushrooms.

Insight into the evolutionary and domesticated history of the most widely cultivated mushroom Agaricus bisporus via mitogenome sequences of 361 global strains

Agaricus bisporus is the most widely cultivated edible mushroom in the world with a only around three hundred years known history of cultivation. Therefore, it represents an ideal organism not only to investigate the natural evolutionary history but also the understanding on the evolution going back to the early era of domestication. In this study, we generated the mitochondrial genome sequences of 352 A. bisporus strains and 9 strains from 4 closely related species around the world. The population mitogenomic study revealed all A. bisporus strains can be divided into seven clades, and all domesticated cultivars present only in two of those clades. The molecular dating analysis showed this species origin in Europe on 4.6 Ma and we proposed the main dispersal routes. The detailed mitogenome structure studies showed that the insertion of the plasmid-derived dpo gene caused a long fragment (MIR) inversion, and the distributions of the fragments of dpo gene were strictly in correspondence with these seven clades. Our studies also showed A. bisporus population contains 30 intron distribution patterns (IDPs), while all cultivars contain only two IDPs, which clearly exhibit intron loss compared to the others. Either the loss occurred before or after domestication, that could suggest that the change facilitates their adaptation to the cultivated environment.

Advances in Mechanism and Application of Molecular Breeding of Medicinal Mushrooms: A Review

With the development of molecular biology and genomics technology, mushroom breeding methods have changed from single traditional breeding to molecular breeding. Compared with traditional breeding methods, molecular breeding has the advantages of short time and high efficiency. It breaks through the restrictive factors of conventional breeding and improves the accuracy of breeding. Molecular breeding technology is gradually applied to mushroom breeding. This paper summarizes the concept of molecular breeding and the application progress of various molecular breeding technologies in mushroom breeding, in order to provide reference for future research on mushroom breeding.