Inoculation With Producing Strains Of Truffle

The French black "Perigord" truffle, Tuber melanosporum, an ectomycorrhizal fungus living in asymbiotic relationship with certain species of trees, has been successfully produced on filberts and oaksusing spore mass inoculation techniques, in Europe for the past 20 years and in North Carolina since1993. While this method has had great success with Pisolithus tinctorius on pines and Rhizopogon spp.on Douglas fir (Castellano, 1994), it has had limited success with T. melanosporum on its hosts.Approaches involving mycelia generated by tissue culture techniques directed towards production oftrees with vigorous T. melanosporum strains have met with little success due to the slow growth of thefungus in vitro (Stamets, 1993). Contamination and short life span in artificial media have compoundedthis problem.The proposed research is intended to demonstrate a novel method using mycorrhized roots from heavilyproducing trees to propagate a desirable strain of Tuber melanosporum in an efficient way.