On September 3, SAAS renewed scientific cooperation framework agreement with Technical University in Zvolen of Slovakia. According to the contract, both parties would conduct cooperative research on the evaluation and screening of Ganoderma characteristic strains in China and Slovakia, as well as the screening of cultivation conditions for bioactive compounds in Ganoderma.

SAAS signed a 5-year cooperation framework agreement with Technical University in Zvolen on March 20, 2015. Both parties have carried out significant scientific cooperation in various aspects during the implementation of the previous agreement since 2015. Researchers from SAAS Institute of Edible Fungi have been conducting substantial cooperation works in the fields of substrate degradation ability and bioactive compound composition of Ganoderma strains with Assoc. prof. Martin Pavlík from Technical University in Zvolen. The cooperative study results were reported on the 10^th International Medicinal Mushroom Conference in 2019 and the report won the second prize in the conference report competition. The results were also published in the SCI journal International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, Vol. 22, No. 8, 2020.

Through the exchanges and cooperation in the past five years, experts have successfully screened several strains contained characteristic triterpenoid from Ganoderma resources, and developed appropriate cultivation conditions and liquid fermentation methods for triterpenoids’ accumulation. These results not only contribute to the discovery of new characteristic strains of Ganoderma that can be developed into health care products in the future, but also are expected to be developed into new nutritional health care products through subsequent research.

The processing technology and fermentation engineering team of SAAS Institute of Edible Fungi has conducted substantial research works on the resources of Ganoderma for a long time. The team has taken the lead in establishing a resource bank containing more than 300 strains of Ganoderma in China, and bred a series of excellent strains for cultivation. At present, most of the strains applied for the studies on the composition and bioactivity of Ganoderma in China are domestic. Besides that, foreign studies studies concerning Slovakia Ganoderma strain resources are limited to the collection and taxonomic identification of strains and are lack of further chemical composition analysis and bioactivity comparison of regional resources. From this aspect, the cooperation agreement could help SAAS research team to have more thorough and sophisticated understandings towards the characteristics of Ganoderma strains in Slovakia, as well as discover some characteristic strains that are different from those in China in terms of bioactive compounds, so as to further develop and utilize the resources.