Alkaloids from Mushrooms

Mushrooms (macrofungi) are a part of the human diet as a source of both food and medicine for centuries especially in East-Asia. The use of mushrooms and their extracts for medicinal purposes became more popular due to increasing number of research conducting on them recently. They predominantly contain polysaccharides, terpenes and sterols. Alkaloids exhibits bioactive effects even in very small doses and mainly distributed in Angiosperms. Their occurrences in macrofungi is very limited and not very-well documented as much as other constituents like polysaccharides or terpenes. In this review, we focused on distribution and bioactivities of mushroom alkaloids