What’s for dinner?: Undescribed species in commercial porcini from China
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Conservation Biology, Evolutionary Studies, Food Science and Technology, Mycology, Taxonomy
- Keywords
- coalescence, contaminant, biodiversity, conservation, global trade, naming, turbo-taxonomy, phylogenetics, species
- Copyright
- © 2014 Dentinger et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. What’s for dinner?: Undescribed species in commercial porcini from China. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e423v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.423v1
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 in the food chain, leading to an improved ability to regulate their harvest and trade, and to monitor potential adverse health effects from their consumption.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ.
Supplemental Information
Aligned sequences in Phylip format
This is a file containing aligned ITS sequences used for the phylogenetic analyses.
