Taxonomic studies and molecular characterisation of Tricholoma giganteum and Calocybe indica isolates from Bangalore.

The agarics Tricholoma giganteum Massee and Calocybe indica Purk. & Chandra showed varied morphological and ecological features, as these data along with microscopic studies of basidiocarps were found to be inadequate to delimit them to species level.  This led to explore using molecular methods to distinguish the species of Tricholoma and Calocybe by analysing the ITS region of rDNA from pure culture.  The DNA sequences obtained in this study were deposited in the GenBank database. ITS sequence of Tricholoma giganteum and Calocybe indica were subjected to the BLAST programme to generate the significant alignment and the close matches to the query sequence. ITS sequence isolated from the pure culture of T.giganteum showed 99% similarity with Tricholoma giganteum (EU051917.1) an isolate from China. Similarly ITS sequence of the pure culture of Calocybe indica of our isolate showed 100% similarity with Calocybe indica (AY636067). Hence the molecular techniques can be used as a tool to avoid misidentification of fungal isolates along with classical identification methods.