ABSTRACT
The retrotransposon marY1 is a gypsy family retroelement, which is detected ubiquitously within the fungal taxonomic groups in which mushrooms are included. To utilize marY1 as a molecular marker for the DNA fingerprinting of mushrooms, oligonucleotides marY1-LTR-L and marY1-LTR-R were designed on the basis of highly conserved regions from the multiple sequence alignment of 30 marY1 sequences retrieved from a nucleotide sequence database. In accordance with Retrotransposon Microsatellite Amplified Polymorphism (REMAP) fingerprinting methodology, the two oligonucleotides were utilized together with the short sequence repeat primers UBC807 and UBC818 for polymerase chain reaction using templates from different mushroom genomic DNAs. Among the tested oligonucleotides, the marY1-LTR-L and UBC807 primer set yielded the greatest amount of abundance and variation in terms of DNA band numbers and patterns. This method was successfully applied to 10 mushroom species, and the primer set successfully discriminated between different commercial mushroom cultivars of the same strains of 14 Pleurotus ostreatus and 16 P. eryngii. REMAP reproducibility was superior to other popular DNA fingerprinting methodologies including the random amplified polymorphic DNA method.