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Abstract: In general, mushrooms are regarded as agarics and boletes which belong to Agaricales. They have attracted most of the attention from mycologists since enormous numbers of fungi in the Agaricales are known to be with relatively complicated characters and also due to their economic importance. In our laboratory, a survey of mushrooms has been carried out under the research projects supported by the Mushroom Research Committee since 1 July 1968 (Hou and Wu, 1971). In the course of identification, we have found some specimens which are hard to identify due to the discrepancies between the taxonomie features of the specimens and their descriptions in the literatures (Imazeki and Hongo, 1957, 1965; Donk, 1962; Singer, 1962). Therefore, we became interested in searching for reliable means to assist traditional classification which mainly relies on the morphology of the taxon. Meantime, the genetic competence of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) has become generally accepted and it appears certain that the data on the specificity of DNA composition are closely related to the characters of the bacteria with phylogenetic significance (Belozersky and Spirin, 1960; Sueoka, 1964; Hill, 1966). Finally, an attempt has been made to determine the base composition of DNA isolated from mushrooms since the analysis of DNA composition is simple and also an approach widely used to solve question of affinity in some other groups of fungi (Storck and Alexopoulos, 1970). Studies on the DNA composition of Agaricales are one of the most neglected fields and deserve special attention from the economic point of view as well as academic curiosity. Nevertheless, the phylogeny of the Agaricales is still a controversial field as already pointed out by Bessey (1950) and Singer (1962). In the present investigation DNA isolated from cultivated and wild mushrooms were analysed in order to find the possible application of DNA base compositions in the taxonomy of mushrooms.
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