Abstract

A REVIEW ON THE POTENTIALITY OF MUSHROOMS AND ITS ALLERGY TO HUMAN HEALTH

Dr. Sabiha Imran*

Abstract

The mushroom is a form of plant life without leaves, buds, flowers, and is recognized as fleshy macro-fungi, a group of achlorophyllous organisms. These are sometimes tough and umbrella like sporophore (fruiting body) with spores, naturally grown in fields, forests, on manure heaps, water channels and hilly areas, mostly during and just after rains. Since earliest time, the mushrooms have been treated as special kinds of food. For overall nutrition mushroom falls between the best vegetables and animal protein sources. Mushroom has a lot of production potential and due to its rapid growth it gives so large amount of crop which could not be compared with any other crop. Mushrooms can also sensitize a person the way pollen and food allergies do. Mushroom pickers showed the cases of allergic rhinitis and asthma as well as anaphylactic reactions. However, so far there is fairly little information available on allergic respiratory passage symptoms caused by mushrooms. The mushrooms are antigenically rich and can have more than one allergen. Mushroom allergenicity, often referred to as basidiospore or basidiomycetes. Recent data suggest that mushroom allergy should not be confined to the Basidiomycotina, a positive correlation between high spore counts and asthma admission rates was found. Those genera producing distinguishable basidiospores are Ganoderma, Boletus, Rhodophyllus, Thelephora, Russula and Lactarius. Most of the spores can be categorized by colour or shape, or as spores of Tremellales or Polyporaceae. Like asidispores, most ascospores occur in high concentrations. in the air from late summer to autumn and mainly when it is wet. The occurrence of the ascospores of mildews resembles that of rusts and smuts with peaks in summer and dry weather. In this study we present about the potentialities of mushroom against various diseases and aeriobiology data about mushroom spores with respect to respiratory allergies.

Keywords: Mushroom, Allergy, Allergen, Basidomycetes, Basidiospore.