Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Wild mushroom harvesting is a booming activity in Canada, mostly in Québec, Ontario and British-Columbia.Considered by some as a recreational activity, the harvest of wild mushrooms has also raised a commercialinterest and now, numerous companies are engaged in picking, transformation and sale of those mushrooms.However, the time invested to find good picking areas entails a high retail price compared with commercialproducts. The high retail price can be explained essentially by two factors: 1) wild mushrooms are picked insmall quantities, they are available during a short period and therefore most people don't include them in theirregular diet, 2) the lack of confidence in the identification renders the consumers hesitant to pay a high pricefor a potentially toxic product. The latter can be justified by the fact that Canada is host of several toxic andsome deadly species, if consumer would be entirely sure of the identification they would more readily consume(and pay for) those products. However, both the MAPAQ (in Québec) and the Canadian Food InspectionAgency (CFIA) lack the personnel, the ability and the tools to provide an accurate identification of the wildmushrooms. The project crafted by Progigraph want to tackles these two issues: supply and security. Throughthe development and use of molecular barcodes Progigraph will add to its current mushroom harvestingpredictive GIS database. Moreover, Progigraph will use new state-of-the-art long read Illumina sequencing toassess environmental complex samples down to the species level. The generated Barcodes will be made publicthrough the International BarCode of Life Database (iBOLD) and will then be available for use by the MAPAQand CFIA and regulatory organisms.