title: Mushroom heteropolysaccharides: A review on their sources, structure and biological effects.
abstract: Mushrooms have been largely studied not only by their d-glucans, but also because they present a class of more complex polymers: the heteropolysaccharides. Heteropolysaccharides show variability on their monosaccharide composition, anomeric configuration, linkage and branching type, besides some of these molecules can present natural methylated monosaccharides and also acid monosaccharides, which enhance the difficulty of the purification and characterization of their structure. As a result of such complexity, mushroom heteropolysaccharides can be considered an interesting source of molecules with medicinal and industrial applications. Consequently a plenty of new researches has been published in the past 12 years about the isolation, chemical characterization and biological activities of heteropolysaccharides from mushrooms, especially from Basidiomycetes. Therefore, this review intends to organize and classify the information described up to now about such polysaccharides obtained from different sources of mushroom-forming fungi, Basidiomycetes, Ascomycetes and Hybrid mushrooms, and provides a brief reflection on how the chemical studies have been carried out.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba CEP 81531-980, Brazil; Division of Glycoscience, AlbaNova University Centre, Royal Institute of Technology, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
authors.forename: Andrea C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Ruthes
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba CEP 81531-980, Brazil; Department of Production and Characterization of Novel Foods, CIAL, Campus de Cantoblanco, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Fhernanda R
authors.initials: FR
authors.lastname: Smiderle
authors.affiliation: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Universidade Federal do Paraná, Curitiba CEP 81531-980, Brazil. Electronic address: iacomini@ufpr.br.
authors.forename: Marcello
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Iacomini
mesh_terms: D001203:Ascomycota / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism; D001487:Basidiomycota / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism; D062610:Fungal Polysaccharides / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism / Q000494:pharmacology; D007218:Industrial Microbiology / Q000379:methods
chemical_list: D062610:Fungal Polysaccharides
keywords: Ascomycete; Basidiomycete; Heteropolysacchides; Hybrid mushroom and biological activity; Mushroom