Strategies for Improvement in Cultivation Practices of Oyster Mushrooms in North Bengal, India

Mushrooms are used as an edible food and medicine since time immemorial. It constitutes a chief source to reduce body weight. The different agricultural wastes were used in cultivation of oyster mushroom. In West Bengal, enormous amount of different wastes are produced annually, and are of no uses. These wastes could be possibly used as a source of food i.e. substrates for cultivation of oyster mushroom. However, the most common cultivation methods of oyster mushroom were found in partial sterilized or sterilized paddy straw. Different types of agro-wastes, by-products and crop residues can be used with conventional polybag method to achieve this mushroom cultivation more profitable and popular. Oyster mushroom was cultivated on different substrates viz. paddy straw, wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse and combination of different straw to assess the suitable substrate. Use of different substrates significantly affected the number of primordia and fruiting bodies, and the amount of fresh weight or yield of mushroom. The highest number of fruiting bodies, the amount of fresh weight and the yield was procured from rice straw in combination with wheat straw followed by rice straw and the lowest with wheat straw. The biological efficiency was also higher in rice with wheat straw. The N, P and K content in straw was found higher in rice straw. The molecular characterization of Pleurotus sp. revealed that maximum similarity of the sequence with Pleurotus ostreatus. A 95 % coverage of the sequence resulted in 92.55% similarity with fungal strain.