Truffle growers in France and Italy have a mixed reaction to the work of Martin’s team. On the one hand, they “are always complaining we are not doing enough for them,” Martin said. On the other, “they don’t want us to get the magic recipe to produce truffles by the ton because then the price would go down.”
Two years ago, Martin decoded the genome of another fungus, known as the bicolored deceiver, with the help of the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif. But the Perigord black truffle is a “national icon,” he said, so he chose a French organization, Genoscope, to do the decoding.
Read more at the Star Tribune.