Accumulation of recalcitrant xylan in mushroom-compost is due to a lack of xylan substituent removing enzyme activities of Agaricus bisporus

•Linear xylan is preferentially degraded over substituted xylan in the compost.•Xylan with both arabinosyl and glucuronic acid residues accumulated in the compost.•Agaricus bisporus lacked the enzymes to degrade xylosyl having two arabinosyl residues.•A. bisporus genes encoding for α-glucuronidases are not expressed in the compost. The ability of Agaricus bisporus to degrade xylan in wheat straw based compost during mushroom formation is unclear. In this paper, xylan was extracted from the compost with water, 1M and 4M alkali. Over the phases analyzed, the remaining xylan was increasingly substituted with (4-O-methyl-)glucuronic acid and arabinosyl residues, both one and two arabinosyl residues per xylosyl residue remained. In the 1M and 4M KOH soluble solids of spent compost, 33 and 49 out of 100 xylosyl residues, respectively, were substituted. The accumulation of glucuronic acid substituents matched with the analysis that the two A. bisporus genes encoding for α-glucuronidase activity (both GH115) were not expressed in the A. bisporus mycelium in the compost during fruiting. Also, in a maximum likelihood tree it was shown that it is not likely that A. bisporus possesses genes encoding for the activity to remove arabinose from xylosyl residues having two arabinosyl residues.