Kumar, MithileshChunletia, Rati Satish2020-02-042020-02-042019http://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810142449Altogether 18 strains of mushrooms belonging to 5 genera namely Agaricus, Calocybe, Lentinula, Pleurotus, Tricholoma were included in present investigation for morphological, biochemical and molecular characterization. These strains were obtained from Directorate of Mushroom Research, Solan and Mushroom Lab, RPCAU, Pusa. All the strains under study were morphologically distinguished at both crop and mycelium stage. Change in colony characters with change in media was observed. Radial growth measurement of mycelium for optimum growth conditions for all the strains were recorded with respect to different media, temperature and pH and best growth for Tricholoma strains was observed on PDA medium, 25°C of temperature and pH 9 while for Agaricus MEA medium, 25°C of temperature and pH 9 were more appropriate. PDA medium, 15°C temperature and pH 7 was suitable for Lentinula strains and WEA medium,15°C temperature and pH 9 for Pleurotus strains. Calocybe strains showed best growth on both PDA and WEA, at 25°C and pH 7. Mycelium study is important as extracellular secretions by mycelium facilitates growth of crop and bioremediation process thus, biochemical screening of enzymatic activities for all the strains was done through plate test for lipase, amylase, laccase and by oxidation discs for oxidase. Lipase showed positive results for all the strains whereas amylase showed restricted response. Among all the strains AB-14-01 showed maximum enzymatic activity. Ample diversity was expected and observed as these strains belong to different genera and species thus, during the assessment of molecular characterization by 19 SSR primer pairs, cross amplification was found to be low. These SSR primers were derived from three different genera namely Agaricus, Calocybe and Pleurotus which gave 103 allelic variants with 52 unique and 51 shared alleles and an average of 5 alleles per primer. The dendrogram based on UPGMA for diversity analysis divided the mushroom entries into a mono-genotypic group (V), a penta-genotypic group (II), two di-genotypic group (III) and (IV), two tetra-genotypic group (III) and (V) which showed complete correspondence with principal coordinate analysis. The primer pairs GB-PO-026, AbSSR42 and AbSSR54 were found to be highly informative for the purpose of molecular profiling of mushroom entries belonging to different genera, species, geographical area and ecology.ennullThesis