editorial medicinal mushroomsdownloads.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/2014/806180.pdfeditorial medicinal...

EditorialMedicinal Mushrooms

Ulrike Lindequist,1 Ha Won Kim,2 Evelin Tiralongo,3 and Leo Van Griensven4

1 Institute of Pharmacy, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, 17487 Greifswald, Germany2Department of Life Sciences, University of Seoul, Seoul 130-743, Republic of Korea3 School of Pharmacy, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, QLD 4222, Australia4 Plant Research International, Department of Bioscience, Wageningen University, 6700AAWageningen, The Netherlands

Correspondence should be addressed to Ulrike Lindequist; [email protected]

Received 20 May 2014; Accepted 20 May 2014; Published 24 June 2014

Copyright © 2014 Ulrike Lindequist et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

Since beginning of mankind nature is the most importantsource of medicines. Bioactive compounds produced byliving organisms can be used directly as drugs or as leadcompounds for drug development. Besides, the natural mate-rial can be used as crude drug for preparation of powder orextracts.

Plants have traditionally been used as a source of mostmedical systems and as such herbal medicines constitute animportant part of traditional and evidence-based medicineworldwide. In contrast though, the broad medicinal use ofmushrooms was for a very long time restricted to Asiancountries. Nowadays, the medicinal use of mushrooms, socalled, medicinal mushrooms’, is increasing also in Westernand other countries. This is underlined not only by growingsales ofmushroomproducts but also by an increasing numberof scientific papers and international conferences in this field.

Medicinal mushrooms can be defined as macroscopicfungi, mostly higher Basidiomycetes, which are used in theform of extracts or powder for prevention, alleviation, orhealing of diseases and/or for nutritional reasons.

Presently medicinal mushrooms are mainly used asdietary supplements or functional food. Nevertheless theyhave the potential to become real drugs of traditional and/orevidence-based medicine. To explore this potential highquality products, preclinical and clinical trials according tothe regulations, and legal authorization are necessary.

The most important mushroom species are Ganodermalucidum, Coriolus versicolor (L.:Fr.)Quel. (syn. Trametes ver-sicolor [L.:Fr.]Pilat), Lentinula edodes (Berk.)Pegler, Agaricus

brasiliensis Wasser et al., Cordyceps sinensis (Berk.)Sacc.(Ophiocordyceps sinensis (Berk.)Sung & al.), Grifola frondosa(Dicks.:Fr.)Gray,Hericium erinaceus (Bull.:Fr.)Pers. and someothers. Due to the extended traditional use of these mush-rooms extensive knowledge about in vitro activities andmodeof action and effects in animal assays is available. Someinformation about several chemical constituents responsiblefor the pharmacological effects is also available. Needless tosay more research on the pharmacology and chemistry ofthese and others, so far less explored mushrooms, is urgentlyneeded.

What’s also missing, however, are investigations aboutstructure-activity-relationships and possible toxicologicalrisks of these mushrooms and their products, clinical trialsand suitable quality critera for mushroom products andestablished methods for its control.

We received 13 research papers in this field which indi-cates that mushroom research is still very limited. How-ever, this special issue includes 6 high-quality peer-reviewedpapers demonstrating essential new findings about differentpharmacological effects of several medicinal mushrooms andtheir components in vitro, in animal assays and in humans.

Chan et al. and Kawai et al. showed that Amaurodermarugosum and Pleurotus eryngii have promising antiinflamma-tory properties. A. rugosum is used by indigenous commu-nities in Malaysia, P. eryngii is consumed as fresh cultivatedmushroomworldwide. Clitocybe nuda, also known as Lepistanuda, is an edible mushroom in Europe. It is known forits antioxidative and antimicrobial properties. The study by

Hindawi Publishing CorporationEvidence-Based Complementary and Alternative MedicineVolume 2014, Article ID 806180, 2 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/806180

2 Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Shi et al. validated the antidiabetic and hypolipidemic effectsof Clitocybe nuda in diabetic mice and gives detailed insightinto its mode of action.

Beta-glucans (MBGS) constitute one of the most impor-tant groups of bioactive compounds in mushrooms. Theyhave been reported as anticancer agents mainly by strength-ening immune activities. The papers of Chen et al. andWu etal. focus on investigations of beta-glucans from Ganodermalucidum, the famous Reishi or Ling Zhi mushroom.The beta-glucans isolated from solid culture of Ganoderma luciduminhibit, in combination with radiation, tumor metastasis inLewis lung carcinoma bearingmice (Chen at el.), whereas theoral administration of MBG, also obtained from myceliumof G. lucidum, modulates immune responses in an allergymurine model (Wu et al.).

The study of Rossi et al. investigated the influenceof a mixture of Ganoderma lucidum and Ophiocordycepssinensis on the performance and stress resistance of cyclistsby monitoring the testosterone/cortisol ratio in saliva, aswell as oxidative stress. Although only a small numberof participants were included in this study, the presentedresults confirm the potential clinical use of mushrooms ingeneral and the protection of the athletes from overtrainingsyndrome in particular.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to express their greatest appreciationto the authors for their fascinating and interesting contribu-tions. The editors would like also to express their gratitudeto the reviewers for their important time and valuablesuggestions/comments to make the special issue a success.The papers published in this special issue not only extendour knowledge about medicinal mushrooms and confirmthe great potential of mushrooms for development of newdrugs, but hopefully also inspire the reader to get involvedin medicinal mushroom research.

Ulrike LindequistHa Won Kim

Evelin TiralongoLeo Van Griensven

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