What’s for dinner?: Undescribed species of porcini in a commercial packet
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Author and article information
Abstract
Accurate diagnosis of the components of our food and a standard lexicon for clear communication is essential for regulating global food trade and identifying food frauds. Reliable identification of wild collected foods can be particularly difficult, especially when they originate in under-documented regions or belong to poorly known groups such as Fungi. Porcini, one of the most widely traded wild edible mushrooms in the world, are large and conspicuous and they are used as a food both on their own and in processed food products. China is a major exporter of porcini, most of it ending up in Europe. We used DNA-sequencing to identify three species of mushroom contained within a commercial packet of dried Chinese porcini purchased in London. Surprisingly, all three have never been formally described by science and required new scientific names. This demonstrates the ubiquity of unknown fungal diversity even in widely traded commercial food products from one of the most charismatic and least overlooked groups of mushrooms. Our rapid analysis and description makes it possible to reliably identify these species, allowing their harvest to be monitored and their presence tracked in the food chain.
Cite this as
2014. What’s for dinner?: Undescribed species of porcini in a commercial packet. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e423v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.423v2note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
Author comment
This is version 2 of the article following initial review.
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Supplemental Information
Aligned sequences in Phylip format
This is a file containing aligned ITS sequences used for the phylogenetic analyses.
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors state no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Bryn TM Dentinger conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Laura M Suz performed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.
DNA Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding the deposition of DNA sequences:
GenBank (KF815926-937, KF854281-283)
Funding
Funding was provided by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. No grants supported this research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
