Fungiculture

The kingdom Fungi contains Basidiomycota or club fungi, which are also known as mushrooms. Fungi can be found in a variety of diverse environments, such as grassland areas, decaying logs, or with symbiotic relationships with the roots of specific trees. Mushrooms acquire food by breaking cellulose down to glucose. This natural process is used by fungi to produce glucose as a food source (technology, 2013). In the final stage of breaking cellulose down to glucose the enzyme cellobiase is used to speed the reaction up. An enzyme is a protein produced by a living organism that acts as a catalyst to speed up a specific biochemical reaction. Enzymes are important because they control the speed of chemical reactions in an organism and without enzymes, these reactions would take place too slowly to keep an organism alive (Museum, 2013). The enzyme cellobiase is a molecule made up of bundled long chains of glucose that are found in plant’s cell wall. Cellobiase (β-glucosidase) is a well characterized enzyme of the cellulose enzyme system which acts synergistically to degrade cellulose into glucose subunits (Ban152). The purpose of this experiment was to measure the rate of cellobiase activity in various club fungi types. The types of club fungi experimentally used was Agaricus bisporus (button mushroom), Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushroom), and Lentinula edodes (shiitake mushroom). The living environments of these three mushrooms are distinctly different. Button mushrooms are…