Pleurotus citrinopileatus - Golden oyster mushroom

Golden oyster mushroom (Pleurotus citrinopileatus) is a bright-yellow-capped relative of oyster mushroom, cultivated on wheat straw for its colour, flavour, and bioactive compound content; in parts of North America it has also escaped cultivation and spread aggressively on dead hardwood, displacing native wood-decay fungi.¹²

Inputs

• Substrate: wheat straw chaff (1-2 cm particle size), wetted to 70% moisture content, sterilised at 121°C for 1 hour; can be enriched with wheat bran or other agricultural by-products.¹
• Spawn run: grain spawn inoculated into the cooled substrate, incubated at 25°C and 80-85% relative humidity until fully colonised.¹
• Fruiting: 21°C, 85-90% relative humidity, 500 lux light for 12 hours a day, CO2 held below 1,000 ppm.¹

Outputs

• Human food: cultivated for its fruiting bodies, prized for their attractive colour.¹
• Medicinal use: fruit bodies contain bioactive triacylglycerols, terpenes, steroids, glucans, polysaccharides, and phenolic compounds with documented antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antihyperglycaemic, and immunostimulatory properties.¹

Type

• Edible fungi

Functions

• None known as a beneficial function in this vault’s sense — in parts of North America (confirmed around Minnesota and the upper Midwest) it has escaped cultivation and established on dead hardwood in the wild, where it reduces native wood-decay fungal diversity on colonised logs; worth factoring into any decision to grow it outdoors rather than in an enclosed system.²

Footnotes

1. Magdziak, Z., Gąsecka, M., Stuper-Szablewska, K., Siwulski, M., Budzyńska, S., Jasińska, A., Niedzielski, P., Kalač, P., Mleczek, M. (2021). A Possibility to Use Selected Crop Post-Extraction Wastes to Improve the Composition of Cultivated Mushroom Pleurotus citrinopileatus. Journal of Fungi, 7(11), 894. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. Golden oyster mushroom | University of Minnesota Extension ↩ ↩²