Howrah: They grew with their white hats sprouting out of the base of a tamarind tree trunk at the bicentennial gate to the Indian Botanic Garden in Shibpur, Howrah.

They belong to a novel genus and species of wild mushroom identified for the first time in science. During monsoon, the mushroom, woody and leathery in nature, flourish.

So, thoughts of having a new mushroom on the plate have to be on hold for now. A wild mushroom, this new macro-fungus, christened "Toothed mushroom" for people and "Mycorrhaphoides stalpersii" for botanists or mycologists, has been spotted, examined, and discovered with a taxonomic name by Botanical Survey of India scientists.

The team included Kanad Das, M.E. Hembrom, Arvind Parihar and their co-workers. Nordic Journal of Botany in its 2017 issue published their research article "Morphology and phylogeny reveal a novel hydnoid taxon from India: Mycorrhaphoides stalpersii gen. and sp. nov".

Kanad Das, who heads the Cryptogamic Unit (Botanical Survey of India) as Scientist 'D' at the garden, and his colleagues have been working on the mushroom diversity in the garden for the past couple of years.

"Mushrooms were thought to be plants for a long time, but now it is known they belong to a huge kingdom called Fungi, which is rather closer to the animal kingdom," Das said.

His team has collected several mushrooms from the garden during routine surveys but this mushroom never came under the focus of taxonomy.

This new toothed mushroom was thoroughly examined for its macro and micro-morphological features as well as phylogenetic studies based on their nuclear ribosomal DNA.

"The studies revealed that this specimen belonged to a separate and unknown genus. The closest genus is the Mycorrhaphium. We proposed s Mycorrhaphoides as the new genus name because our mushroom has several features close to this genus. We gave a new epithet to the species... stalpersii to commemorate Joost A. Stalpers, whose contribution on tooth-fungi is significant," Das said.

The scientist, however, said the mushroom could be edible. "All edible mushrooms came from the wild. Once they were cultivated and widely circulated, they came to be appreciated by the people. In the fungi kingdom, there are probably 3.5 to 5.3 million species, of which more than 106,000 are known," he said.

But it is a parasite and exploits the host plant for nutrition, he said.

"It is important to identify the rest because not only do the mushrooms make for delicious dishes, they also show antitumour, antifungal, antibacterial, cholesterol-lowering, antiviral and antioxidant properties," Das said.

They need to be conserved to prevent the loss of biodiversity, he said.