Coprinopsis cinerea

Figure 1. Mature Coprinopsis cinerea mushrooms fruiting in a deep Petri dish. (Photo courtesy of Hajime Muraguchi.) What is Coprinopsis cinerea? Coprinopsis cinerea is a small mushroom that has attracted the attention of geneticists and cytologists — and also, apparently, taxonomists, as the species has undergone five name changes in the last 30 years, most recently from Coprinus cinereus to Coprinopsis cinerea. It lies at the larger end of the 100,000-fold size range in the fungal kingdom, members of which include the microscopic yeasts and the giant toadstools. Even mushrooms of more modest size are capable of exerting forces sufficient to displace overlying flagstones, forces which Reginald Buller measured in his wide-ranging investigations in the early 20th century. Unlike the vast majority of mushrooms, C. cinerea is easy to culture in the laboratory on defined media. Thus it is not surprising that it has emerged as the model organism for large multicellular fungi — the larger members of a kingdom which has provided deep insights into eukaryotic biology through work on budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, one of the key ‘genetic model systems’ of modern biology.