About

This page is meant to help explain the purpose behind the healing-mushrooms.net website.

Mushrooms have been used in traditional oriental medicine for thousands of years. Only in recent decades has the Western scientific community begun to elaborate the details of medicinal compounds in fungi and how they work at the biochemical level. In order to familiarize myself with the scientific literature about medicinal mushrooms, I set out to comprehensively review the field. These web pages are a byproduct of this ongoing research. The goal of healing-mushrooms.net is to provide accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive information about the chemistry, biochemistry and pharmacology of medicinal fungi and the bioactive compounds they contain. This database is continuously under construction as more mushroom species are added, and existing entries are updated as new research appears.

To clarify some basic semantics, I’ll use the following definition as the main criteria for a mushroom’s inclusion:

Medicine: any substance or substances that treats, prevents or alleviates the symptoms of disease.

Any mushroom that contains chemical compounds with scientifically validated medicinal properties will (eventually) be included on the pages. For the most part, ‘scientifically validated’ implies publication in a refereed scientific journal; however, some instances will warrant a loosening of this criteria.

The individual mushroom files are linked through various menus and pages to enable both professional readers and readers new to medicinal mushrooms easy access to search the available mushroom information. Click on one of the links in the sidebar menus, or use the search engine to navigate these pages. Please refer to the Conditions of Use.

Universities, schools, researchers, mycologists, botanists, ethnobotanists, chemists, health professionals, phytochemists, and other professionals involved in the study of mushrooms, herbal medicine and natural products are invited to access or link to the website and/or its specific mushroom database pages for educational and informational purposes. Please be advised that it contains information which may be difficult to understand for the average lay person or non-professional. If you are a lay person, you are advised to read the database guidelines and to always seek the help and advice of more experience professionals in understanding and interpreting the more technical and clinical information in the database. I have tried to link mycological or scientific terms to the glossary to make it easy to quickly check the meaning of obscure terms.

This database is written and maintained by Austin Collins. The information provided in the healing-mushrooms.net website is collected from many sources and publications to provide a factual and accurate account of the mushrooms described herein.

Please be advised that healing-mushrooms.net is copyrighted. All rights are reserved and no part of this database or individual database files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system (including websites), without written authorization from healing-mushrooms.net. In other words… please feel free to link to the database and files, but do NOT copy them, use them in a commercial capacity or load them onto other web sites or web pages. For non-commercial educational use, please contact the owner.

listings for over 900 medicinal mushroom species containing the following information (if available):

• current scientific name
• all known synonyms and popular (common) names, in a variety of languages
• taxonomic information
• habitat, distribution and frequency
• descriptions, both macro- and microscopic
• uses in traditional medicines
• nutritional composition
• color photographs and/or drawings
• explanatory summaries of current scientific knowledge
• cultivation methods
• extensive glossary of scientific terms
• chemical structures of bioactive compounds (secondary metabolites)
• detailed bibliographies and reference lists, including hyperlinks to abstracts
• links to PDF files when available (as free content from the publisher)
• explanations and descriptions of experimental methods and techniques used to analyze mushroom constituents

In some distant future (and depending on my long-term motivation), I may include a database of natural compounds from fungi, which might include information like:

• descriptive data (molecular formula and mass, elemental composition, CAS registry number)
• physico-chemical data (melting point, optical rotation)
• spectroscopic data (UV, ¹³C-NMR, IR and mass spectra)
• biological data (pharmacological activity, toxicity)
• information on origin and isolation
• summary of literature sources