Abstract
True truffles include the most prized mushrooms in the world and some of the most studied species model for mycorrhizal ecology. Despite the recurring difficulties encountered in isolating and cultivating truffle mycelium, a wealth of literature has been dedicated to the biology and ecology of these fungi since the early 19th. Here, we compile French-language literature on Tuberaceae, much of which remains underexplored despite its scientific potential. We report ecological interactions between truffles, plants, and other fungi. We present TuberIndex 1.0, an open-access dataset compiling five centuries of literature on Tuberaceae and their ecological interactions. The dataset indexes 493 documents and reports 3,508 records of interactions involving 26 truffle taxa, 418 plant taxa, and 53 fungal taxa. A central objective of the dataset is to facilitate future research by providing a valuable resource on truffle interactions, while also supporting innovative agricultural practices.
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Data availability
The TuberIndex 1.0 dataset is openly available on Zenodo27. It includes three main CSV files (bibliographic data, interaction data, and taxonomy reference), complemented by a BibTeX export and a raw archive. The dataset is released under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Code availability
Data processing was realized with R version 4.4.236, and tidyverse37, rgbif38, taxize39 packages. The computer codes used to generate and clean TuberIndex dataset are freely available at: https://github.com/Montan-Gautier/TuberIndex-1.0.
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Acknowledgements
This work is part of the PhD of Montan Gautier, funded by the French National Agency for Research and Technology (ANRT) and by Pépinières Tenoux (ANRT program 2023/0047). We thank the truffle growers who contributed to this work, in particular Laurent Genola (Station trufficole du Montat) and Michel Tournayre. We would like to thank Yann Nicolas for introducing us to French catalogues, and Annabelle Fila and Fatima Boukheda from Archipel at Institut Agro Montpellier for the time they devoted to borrowing books for TuberIndex, and for granting us access to the Institut Agro archives. Additionally, we thank Céline Blitz-Frayret from UMR Eco&Sols for sharing with us the guidelines for publishing this dataset. We are also grateful to the French National Research Agency (ANR) for supporting this work through the REFOUND project (24-CE32-4333).
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Idea and conceptualization: M.G. Methodology: M.G., F.R., E.T. and N.L. Compilation: M.G., F.R. and E.T. R code and Data structure: M.G. Visualization and original writing: M.G. Writing review and editing: M.G., E.T., N.L. and F.R. All authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Gautier, M., Taschen, E., Lescureux, N. et al. TuberIndex 1.0, a dataset of ecological interactions from five centuries of French literature on Tuberaceae.
Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07097-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07097-3
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