A 21st century miniguide to sporophore morphogenesis and development in Agaricomycetes and their biotechnological potential

We review the most recent developments in understanding the nature of development and morphogenesis in fungi and suggest how it might be applied to biotechnological manipulation of some cultivated mushrooms.We believe that it is essential to match the deductions of the molecular observations of the genomics generation with the inductive reasoning of the in vivo experiments and observations of the pregenomics generations to take full advantage of the synergism between the approaches to illuminate better the living biology of the system.As specific examples we show how model mushroom fungi (Coprinopsis and Volvariella) make hymenia and gills (not forgetting how the polypore Phellinus makes tubes), developmental commitment and pattern formation.The Coprinopsis sporophore also provides examples for the construction of mushroom stems and the co-ordination of cell behaviour throughout the maturing sporophore and the timing process that achieves that.This leads us to consider the mechanics of the mushroom and its dependence on the biochemistry and regulation of metabolism in relation to morphogenesis, and how it varies between species.We finish with our summary of the basic principles of fungal developmental biology.Having demonstrated how classic approaches allowed progress to be made in the study of fungal development we show how this has been accelerated by genomics and other aspects of global analysis of macromolecules.We also include work on some cultivated mushrooms to illustrate how the generalisations from research on model organisms might be applied in mushroom farming.