Breeding for bruising insensitive mushrooms for cost efficient mechanical harvesting
The future of the Dutch mushroom industry requires an innovative production platform where high quality mushrooms can be produced at considerable lower costs. This project intends to generate knowledge and tools needed to breed new mushroom strains adapted to this system. The target character for new strains is a low sensitivity to bruising and thus suited for mechanical harvesting systems (i.e. robot picking). This allows a strong reduction in production costs.
In addition, the project intends to generate knowledge on physiological processes on bruising by mechanical damage and discoloration during shelf life. The latter allows the adaptation of the conditions in the production chain towards a better quality of the product.
The project involves three work packages to achieve this goal: 1) Assessment of natural variation in wild population during different growth conditions; 2) Study of the physiology of bruising by mechanical damage and during storage (using genomics, proteomic and metabolomics tools) to identify and unravel biochemical pathways involved; 3) Develop populations, breeding material and tools for QTL mapping for efficient breeding in the future. The genome of A. bisporus will be sequenced by JGI (USA) (
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/whri/research/agaricusgenome/) and data are expected to become available in 2009. This certainly will assist in the identification of genes involved in bruising and shelf life.