Myco-antioxidants: insights into the natural metabolic treasure and their biological effects

Hebatallah H. Abo Nahas, Mohamed A. Abdel-Rahman, Vijai K. Gupta & Ahmed M. Abdel-Azeem

Sydowia 75: 151-179

Published online on January 31, 2023

Since fungi are functionally and structurally distinct from animals and plants, scientists have considered them as a separate biological kingdom, which contains far more species than the plant kingdom. Taxa belonging to kingdom Fungi are distributed among nineteen phyla. To date, about 500,000 secondary metabolites have been described and 70,000 of them come from microbes. Roughly 33,500 bioactive microbial metabolites have altogether been described and out of them about 47 % (15,600) are of fungal origin. A broad variety of fungal biomolecules have been identified as natural antioxidants, including nucleobases, polyketides, terpenoids, flavonoids, coumarins, xanthones, semiquinones, peptides, and phenolic acids. Recently fungi attracted the attention of researchers as a new promising, safe and sustainable source for antioxidants production. The bioprospecting of fungi (estimated by 2.2 to 3.8 million species with 150,000 currently accepted taxa) as a sustainable and potential source of novel biomolecules has been the target of tremendous research worldwide. This review sheds the light on proper utilization of some common fungal taxa as antioxidants producers with a prime concern regarding their isolation, fermentation, extraction, and chemical structure which can be utilized for the generation of new medicines and biotechnological applications.

Keywords: Antioxidant assays, Chaetomium, classification, environmental stress tolerance, free radicals, Ganoderma.

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