Researchers at Mashhad Jihad University in northeastern Iran have developed high quality, first generation (F1) mushroom spawn, an official said.

Hamid Reza Pourianfar, the head of Research Group of Industrial Fungi affiliated to the university, added that the hybrid mushroom spawn increases mushroom yield.

Mushroom spawn is simply any substance that has been inoculated with mycelium, the vegetative growth of a fungus. Mycelium, a thread-like collection of cells, is to a mushroom what an apple tree is to an apple. You need to have one as the base for producing the other.

The spawn is used to transfer mycelium onto any material from which mushrooms will grow, called a substrate.

An F1 hybrid (or filial 1 hybrid) is the first filial generation of offspring of distinctly different parental types. F1 hybrids are used in genetics and in selective breeding, where it may appear as F1 crossbreed.

The term is sometimes written with a subscript as F1 hybrid. The offspring of distinctly different parental types produces a new, uniform phenotype with a combination of characteristics from the parents.

In fish breeding, those parents frequently are two closely related fish species, while the parents usually are two inbred lines in plant and animal genetics.