ABSTRACT
Mushrooms have been a part of fungal diversity for about 300 million years. ey represent a highly specialized group of fungi endowed with the ability to degrade and bio-convert a variety of inedible plant wastes into a useful form of food. Apart from their culinary, nutritional, and health benets, mushrooms are now recognized as a food contributing to amelioration of protein malnutrition for the ever increasing population. It is a “macrofungus” with a distinctive fruiting body, which can either be epigeous or hypogeous and large enough to be seen with naked eye and to be picked by hand (Chang and Miles, 1992). us, mushrooms need not be basidiomycetes, nor aerial, or eshy, or edible but can be ascomycetes, grow underground, have a non-eshy texture, and need not be edible.
