MEDICINALLY IMPORTANT MUSHROOMS
Synopsis Many edible and non-edible mushrooms have long been used worldwide, especially in the Orient, for medicinal purposes. This Chapter gives a brief summary of the most important and widely used species. In each case their historical and current traditional use is considered together, where appropriate, with their commercial and modern medical applications. Important pharmaceutical products with proven medical applications have been derived from Ganoderma spp., Lentinus edodes, Schizophyllum commune, Tremella fusiformis, Trametes versicolor, and Grifola frondosa, and more recently Phellinus and Hericium erinaceus
. In addition to their nutritional value, many edible large mushrooms have long been used in the Orient for medicinal purposes. Many non-edible species have also gained important medicinal usage. An old Chinese proverb states that “medicine and food have a common origin”. At present there are at least 270 species of mushroom that are known to have various therapeutic properties (Ying et al., 1987). The practice of using fungi, especially mushrooms, in Chinese herbal medicines has been recorded in early records of the “Materia Medica”. The earliest book on medicinal materials in China, the “Shen Noug’s Herbel” (Shen Noug Pen Ts’ao Jing) (100-200AD), recorded the medicinal effects of several mushrooms including Ganoderma lucidum, Poria cocos, Tremella fuciformis and others. The most outstanding work on traditional Chinese medicines “Pen Ts’ao Kang Mu” (Compendium of Materia Medica) compiled by Li Shi-Zhen of the Ming Dynasty and published in 1575 documented more than 20 mushroom species, together with a non-mushroom insect-infesting fungus Cordyceps senensis which continues to be a major Chinese medicinal fungus (Bensky and Gamble, 1993).
Medicinal mushrooms have become even more widely used as traditional medicinal ingredients for the treatment of various diseases and related health problems largely due to the increased ability to produce the mushrooms by artificial methods. As a result of large numbers of scientific studies on medicinal mushrooms especially in Japan, China and Korea, over the past three decades, many of the traditional uses have been confirmed and new applications developed (Table 1, Wasser and Weis, 1999a). While much attention has been drawn to various immunological and anti-cancer properties of these mushrooms they also offer other potentially important therapeutic properties including antioxidants, anti-hypertensive, cholesterol-lowering, liver protection, anti-fibrotic, anti-inflammatory, anti-diabetic, anti-viral and anti-microbial. These properties will be examined in a later chapter. Clearly, many pharmaceutical companies in the Far East are viewing the medicinal mushrooms as a rich source of innovative biomedical molecules. Many polysaccharide-bound proteins produced by Basidiomycete fungi have been classified as anti-tumour chemicals by the US National Cancer Institute (Jong and Donovick, 1989). Some of the more important and leading medicinal fungi used in the Far East will be briefly summarised. For fuller details of each medicinal mushroom reference should be made to Hobbs (1995), Stamets (1993, 2001) and Mizuno (1995). A recent general paper by Wasser and Weis (1999b) gives detailed general mycological information on several of the most important medicinally valuable Basidiomycetes mushrooms, including biological and ethnomycological properties, taxonomy, morphology, anatomy, description, cultural characteristics, and distributions.
