Ganoderma: The wild mushroom with wonderful health benefits

Abstract

Mushrooms are used as a nutritional rich food and used as traditional medicine to cure many life-threatening diseases since long ago. It is regarded as “Food of gods” by the Romans and a “wonder herb for the warriors” by the Greek and an “elixir of life by the Chinese”. Among all major mushrooms, Ganoderma lucidum is the utmost important one with various therapeutic and pharmaceutical properties. The mycelium, spores and the fruiting bodies carry the medicinal properties. It is more popular in Asian countries but the amazing attributes have widespread throughout the world. It is the new focus of interest in modern pharmacological and biochemical research in recent years. The antimicrobial, anti-diabetic, anti-aging, antioxidant, anti-allergic, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulating functions of mushroom made it more popular among the drug industries. The existence of potential bioactive compounds such as polysaccharides, triterpenoids, proteins, peptides etc have amazing health benefits against hepatitis, hypertensions, asthma, gastric, insomnia etc. Ganoderma lucidum is proved as one of the best anti-cancer agents from decades due to its inhibitory effect on cancerous and tumour cells, protects from cell proliferation etc. This review describes about all the amazing health benefits of G. lucidum. But more research is required in near future to discover novel bioactive compounds and mass production of this medicine which will help the mankind.