In recent years, there has been a growing movement to find environmentally friendly and renewable materials, and mushrooms have emerged as a new resource attracting attention. Mushrooms primarily contain components like chitin, β-glucans, α-glucans, and proteins, all of which are materials that can naturally regenerate. Therefore, products based on mushrooms have excellent characteristics, being inexpensive, having low environmental impact, and further being reducible to nature.

Mushroom mycelium is cultivated and utilized to produce various items such as packaging materials, soundproofing materials, cloth, leather made from mushrooms, and films made from mushroom fibers. Additionally, there are attempts to process the mushroom body (fruiting body) mechanically or chemically to obtain new mushroom-derived materials.

However, the materials currently derived from the fruiting bodies of mushrooms remove the useful components of the mushroom and utilize them by breaking down the mycelium to a microscopic level. As a result, the natural functions of the mycelium cannot be fully exploited. Moreover, these materials often cannot entirely remove the pigments and other substances contained in the mushrooms, leading to issues where the products become brown or orange in color. In response to this, we have developed a new method to produce white fungal fibers, also known as white mycelial pulp, while preserving the structure of the mycelium.

Fruiting bodies can be used whether they are naturally derived or cultivated. Additionally, the harvest residues and used residues of mushrooms cultivated for other purposes, as well as their dried products, can be used if the fibrous form of the mycelium is retained. Specifically, this technology can utilize the harvest residues and used residues from bed cultivation, the mainstream of current mushroom cultivation, and may contribute to solving the issue of reusing waste in the mushroom industry. Moreover, since mushrooms are produced using unused resources, they hold high value as environmentally friendly materials. The manufactured white mycelial pulp is believed to retain almost all of the fruiting body components, so, for example, adding white mycelial pulp to food allows easy ingestion of the desired nutritional and functional components of the mushrooms.

Additionally, the use of this mycelial pulp allows for shaping into fibers, films, etc., making it suitable for processing into various products such as textiles, packaging, paper products, and more. In this consortium, the technology developed at Shinshu University is being utilized as the core, aiming to effectively use the parts of mushrooms that are not utilized in the mushroom industry.