Zhou et al. 2018 - Pleurotus Metals on Biogas-Residue Substrates

Zhou et al. evaluated whether chicken-manure biogas residue could be used as a substrate component for cultivating edible oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus). The study measured cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic in the raw materials and in dried first-flush mushroom fruiting bodies across seven substrate treatments.

Key numbers

The authors state that Pb, Cd, Hg, and As in all dried Pleurotus fruiting bodies were within China’s Green Food edible-mushroom limits for dried mushrooms: Pb 2.0 mg/kg, Cd 1.0 mg/kg, Hg 0.2 mg/kg, and As 1.0 mg/kg.

Methods (brief)

Pleurotus ostreatus (strain Huimei No. 2) was cultivated on seven substrate formulas using cottonseed hull, wheat bran, lime, water, and increasing fractions of chicken-manure biogas residue (0 to 60%). Three flushes were harvested; chemical composition and heavy metals were measured in dried first-flush fruiting bodies. Heavy metals were analyzed by Pony Testing International Group (Beijing, China); results are reported as dry-weight mg/kg. Differences among treatment means were assessed by Duncan’s multiple range test at the 95% confidence level using IBM SPSS Statistics V22.0. The paper does not name the analytical instrument or report LODs, and reports total arsenic and total mercury without speciation.

Implications

This source contributes cultivated edible-mushroom occurrence context for Pb, Cd, Hg, and total arsenic under experimental substrate conditions. It is useful for ingredient-level mushroom contamination and substrate-transfer context, but it should not be treated as routine retail-market evidence.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Mushrooms
• Lead
• Cadmium
• Mercury
• Arsenic

Verification notes

• Batch 3 auto-fetched ingest, 2026-05-25. The wishlist row targeted mixed fruit, but the actual paper measures oyster mushroom fruiting bodies.
• Speciation: arsenic and mercury are total/unspecified measurements; do not treat them as inorganic arsenic or methylmercury.
• Basis: mushroom concentrations are dry-weight values. The authors discuss fresh-mushroom regulatory limits but note the reported mushroom data are dried fruiting-body measurements.
• Mushroom routing: routed to the umbrella Mushrooms scaffold. wild-mushrooms is reserved for foraged species (porcini, chanterelle, morel, boletus per the alias list); this paper studies cultivated Pleurotus ostreatus and must not aggregate into the wild-mushroom contamination profile.
• Audited 2026-06-08 (autonomous audit): corrected lowest mushroom Pb from a Cd-column transposition (0.0550 mg/kg in T6) to the actual lowest Pb value (0.7850 ± 0.0350 mg/kg in T4); added treatment attribution for highest Cd (T3); dropped misrouted vegetables and wild-mushrooms ingredients in favor of the umbrella mushrooms slug; named the testing laboratory (Pony Testing International Group, Beijing) in Methods.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.