Somatic recombination in the cultivated mushroom Agaricus bisporus

Agaricus bisporus, the cultivated button mushroom, has a mostly secondarily homothallic life cycle. This mode of sexual reproduction could limit outcrossing and recombination among homokaryons in natural populations and also creates difficulties in mushroom breeding. An alternative source of recombinant genotypes is from somatic pairings of heterokaryons. In this study, two homokaryon × heterokaryon and three heterokaryon × heterokaryon …