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영어

The Korea Mushroom Resource Bank (KMRB) was established as a national research resource bank in 2015, supported by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning. The main goals of the KMRB is to secure fungal biodiversity, to conserve an important fungal biological resource, especially mushroom-forming Basidiomycota, and to provide useful resources to research institute, company and university. KMRB has not only preserved 1631 isolates (335 species) and 756 spore prints (327 species) but also retained the dried specimen and genomic DNA. A various types of mushroom resources has been deposited in KMRB: a medicinal mushroom (e.g., Fomitopsis, Ganoderma, and Sanghuangporus), which is known to have antitumor and immune-stimulant properties, edible mushrooms (e.g., Hypsizygus, Lentinula, and Lentinus), which have nutritional and culinary values, and decaying mushrooms (e.g., Irpex and Phanerochaete), which present excellent enzyme activity. As the utility of mushroom resources is recently increasing in medicinal, industrial, and academic areas, the role of KMRB has grown in importance. The crucial tasks of KMRB are as follows: 1) investigating the mushrooms in natural environments across South Korea to make a list of mushroom diversity, 2) establishing a resource management system for accurate identification of mushrooms, 3) assessing the availability of the discovered mushrooms, and 4) setting up a secure preservation and ordering system. As the values of mushrooms increase, KMRB will provide more great opportunities for academic performance and industrial applications in various areas. This work was supported by Korea Basidiomycota Resources Center of the National Research Foundation [NRF- 2015M3A9B8029237].