French scientists today announced plans to clone black truffles and grow them in a lab (Financial Times).

Marking the start of truffle season, the French region of Corrèze launched a three-year plan that it hopes will revive supplies of the precious fungus – which fetches €1,000 ($1,265) per kilo at market but is harvested less and less. FT reports:

Their goal is to unlock the secrets of black truffle production – the soil, climate or the trees – and hopefully revive an endangered industry by producing a more consistent crop.

The project will involve culturing cloned truffles together with tree saplings in rows of sterile test tubes until they form their crucial symbiotic relationship, a process that can take up to a year. Once the pair is established they will be planted out to mature naturally.

The Times and the Telegraph pick up the story (the latter in a close paraphrase of the FT).

Says Jacques Pebeyre, an octogenarian author and truffier known as France’s ‘truffle king’, “I am not against helping nature.” But, he adds, “we need to know how good these [cloned] truffles will be. In the end it all depends on that” (FT).