The time courses of the polysaccharide, lignin with extractives, and ash contents for experiments conducted at 44.0 mg of P. ostreatus/g of stems and 1.60 g of H2O/g of stems are presented in Fig. 2. Time courses such as these were used to estimate xylan and glucan conversions for separate replicate samples, which were then averaged. The xylan and glucan conversions and AX/AG ratios for 23.0-149 mg of P. ostreatus/g of stems and 1.10-2.24 g of H2O/g of stems are presented in Table 4; refer to Fig. 1 for the complete set of inoculum and moisture combinations tested. Of the moisture and inoculum combinations shown in Fig. 1, the (mois­ture, inoculum) combinations (0.77, 21.0), (0.90, 34.0), and (1.20, 41.0) were performed early in the study and displayed visually uneven growth of

fungus in the stems, indicating inhomogeneous distribution of the mycelia over the straw stem surface. Samples taken from the tops and bottoms of these columns also displayed widely variable degradation results, indi­cating poor distribution of the inoculum. The methods were modified, and the uneven distribution of fungal mycelia on the straw was minimized in future experiments. These three data sets were thus not considered further in analyses of the data. The ЛХ/ AG ratios for the preliminary tests con­ducted at 0.0-10.9 mg of P. ostreatus/g of stems and 0.40-0.77 g of H2O/g of stems are given in Table 3, while the xylan and glucan conversions for those preliminary experiments are available elsewhere (15).