Theresa Appiah, Christian Agyare and Yinggang Luo
Mushooms have recently attracted attention and are exploited for food and medicinal purposes. Accurate identification of mushrooms is key in utilizing them for the benefit of humans. However, morphological identification of mushrooms is time consuming, tedious and may be prone to error. DNA markers are quick and reliable tools that are useful in mushroom taxonomy. Thus this study confirmed the identity of six Ghanaian mushrooms using the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences. The ribosomal DNA-ITS fragments of genomic DNA of six wild mushrooms were amplified using ITS1 and ITS4 primers. The amplicons were sequenced and data assembled and analyzed using Bio Edit. Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) search was carried out using the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) database. The data obtained from the sequence alignment were used to plot a phylogenetic tree using the Neighbor-Joining method in Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA). The nucleotide sequences of the six mushrooms blasted against sequences from GenBank data base revealed that Volvariella volvacea, Trametes elegans, Trametes gibbosa, Ganoderma lucidum, Pleurotus ostreatus and Schizophyllum commune matched 100, 97, 99, 98, 98 and 100% Volvariella volvacea strain OE-55, Trametes elegans isolate BCC23750, Trametes gibbosa strain 391, Ganoderma lucidum strain IMSNU32114, Pleurotus ostreatus strain H-8 and Schizophyllum commune strain SCSIO, with accession numbers KC142119, FJ372691.1, KC525203.1, AF214467.1, JQ837478.1 and KX258807.1, respectively.
Phylogenetic tree showed close relationship between T. elegans and T. gibbosa, V. volvacea and P. ostreatus. Molecular identification of all six mushrooms corresponded to morphological identification up to species level. This is the first report on identification of these Ghanaian mushrooms using the ITS sequences.
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