Phylum Basidiomycota Lab Report

INTRODUCTION The experiment studied mushrooms, which are members of the phylum Basidiomycota and the kingdom Fungi. The study tested three types of mushrooms: Agaricus bisporus commonly known as the button mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus or the oyster mushroom, and Tricholoma magnivelare or the shiitake mushroom. The three types of mushrooms decompose different forms of organic matter and occupy different habitats. The oyster mushrooms live on tree roots and decompose dying hardwood trees; the button mushrooms live in grasslands and decompose manure; and shiitake mushrooms decompose dying deciduous trees. To decompose the cellulose found in the cell wall of plants, mushrooms use the enzyme cellobiase. Cellobiase is important because it is the rate limiting enzyme in the production of glucose (Wei et al., 2012). In this experiment the substrate for cellobiase, cellobiose, was replaced with gluco p-nitrophenyl. Gluco p-nitrophenyl turns yellow when it is exposed to the stop solution. The absorbance of the solution that contains the Gluco p-nitrophenyl can be measured using a spectrometer. The purpose of the experiment conducted was to compare the rate of …show more content…
The button mushroom had the highest activity rate which means it decomposed more cellobiose than any other mushroom. While the oyster mushroom had the highest rate of absorbance, 0.1502 nm/min, its overall activity rate, 0.2835 nm/min, was lower than that of the button mushroom. It can be concluded that the rate of decomposition may be higher in mushrooms that decompose just cellulose like the button mushroom. This may be because cellulose is easier to decompose than ligin so the mushrooms that decompose it work faster than those that have to decompose ligin as