Cultivation, Molecular Identification and Productivity Assessment of a commercial strain and two Wild Strains of Ganoderma mushroom Harvested from Tree Stumps in a Rainforest at Ugbowo, Benin City, Nigeria

Abstract

Ganoderma mushroom is one of the most important medicinal mushrooms that has been used especially in the Orients for the treatment of diverse chronic disease conditions. Therefore, the objective of this study is cultivation, molecular identification and productivity assessment of a commercial strain (W1) and two wild strains (W2 & W3) of Ganoderma mushroom harvested from tree stumps in a rainforest at Ugbowo, Benin City, Nigeria using appropriate standard techniques. The molecular study revealed that all the three strains were indeed Ganoderma lucidum, though, results show that there were significant differences among the strains. Irrespective of the inoculum size, the number of days to maturity of the fruiting bodies was about 30 days for strain W3, 18 -22 days for strain W2 and 10-11 days for strain W1. Overall, it took 6-11 days for primordial formation and 10-30 days for maturity of the fruiting bodies. The biological efficiency (BE) of the strain ranged from 0.7 -2.4%. The results show that biological efficiency of the strains was poor, perhaps due to the infancy of Ganoderma cultivation in the country caused by poor substrates and supplements selection, colonization and fruiting conditions.  Notwithstanding, the productivity of the strains could be improved through breeding.