TABLE 4.

Time courses of wood decay and detection of brown-rot basidiomycetes

Expt and species	Time	Mean % wt loss of wood ± SDa	PCR amplificationb with primer pair:
			ITS1-F–ITS4	ITS1-F–ITS4-B
Expt 1 (wood blocks cut from radial sections of spruce)
Uninoculated control	0	0.3 ± 0.4	+−−	−−−
Uninoculated control	8 mo	0.4 ± 0.3	+++	−−−
Gloeophyllum trabeum Mad-617-R	1 wk	0.7 ± 1.6	+++	+++
	2 wk	15.5 ± 4.2	+++	+++
	4 wk	34.1 ± 2.0	+++	+++
	8 wk	64.7 ± 1.9	+++	+++
	4 mo	70.1 ± 1.0	+++	+++
	8 mo	69.3 ± 2.3	+++	+++
Postia placenta Mad-698-R	1 wk	2.6 ± 0.4	+++	+++
	2 wk	11.7 ± 2.8	+++	+++
	4 wk	44.2 ± 9.7	+++	+++
	8 wk	61.9 ± 0.8	+++	+++
	4 mo	66.3 ± 0.5	+++	+++
	8 mo	67.6 ± 0.6	+++	+++
Expt 2 (wood blocks cut from longitudinal sections of spruce)
Uninoculated control	0	0.3 ± 0.2	−−−	−−−
Uninoculated control	8 mo	0.03 ± 0.1	+++	−−−
Gloeophyllum trabeum Mad-617-R	1 wk	0.3 ± 0.4	+++	+++
	2 wk	1.9 ± 1.2	+++	+++
	4 wk	13.5 ± 2.1	+++	+++
	8 wk	34.5 ± 2.7	+++	+++
	4 mo	63.7 ± 8.0	+−+	+−+
	8 mo	70.7 ± 6.5	+++	+++
Postia placenta Mad-698-R	1 wk	0.5 ± 0.4	+++	−−+
	2 wk	3.0 ± 0.7	+++	+++
	4 wk	14.8 ± 3.1	+++	+−+
	8 wk	38.7 ± 8.1	+++	++−
	4 mo	59.8 ± 3.7	+++	++−
	8 mo	60.7 ± 6.1	+++	+++

^aMean of three replicate spruce wood blocks. 

^bPrimer ITS1-F is specific for higher fungi, primer ITS4 is a universal primer, and primer ITS4-B is specific for basidiomycetes. Each plus or minus sign represents the amplification results for an individual wood block.