Ganoderma is a polypores mushooms which grow on wood and include about 80 species.A team from the University of Western Sydney's Centre for Complementary Medicine Research (CompleMED) is working with the Cardiac Health Institute to find out if the medicinal mushroom, Ganoderma lucidum, can reduce high blood sugar, often a precursor to diabetes - as well as treat other health problems.
What Are Polypores?The polypores are among the most common, widespread, and easily identifiable groups of wild mushrooms, with some excellent edible species and no poisonous ones, a great group for new mushroomers to study. Polypores have three features that, in combination, make them distinct:
1. They nearly all grow on wood, such as trees, logs, stumps, or buried wood. That's because these fungi are either decomposers or parasites, or both. This does not mean all mushrooms that grow on wood are safe to eat. Other types of mushrooms also grow on wood, and some of them are poisonous. 2. Polypores, sometimes also called bracket fungi, are generally shaped like shelves, not like umbrellas (although some are crust-like). If there's a stem, it's usually short and off-center. Again, not all mushrooms with off-center stems are safe to eat. Mushrooms other than polypores have off-center stems. 3. Polypores all have many tiny holes, or pores, on the undersides of their caps (polypore means many pores). Microscopic spores emerge from these pores. You can usually see the pores (but not the spores) with the naked eye, but sometimes they're so small, you'll need a magnifying glass or loupe to see them. This does not mean all mushrooms with pores underneath are safe to eat. Boletes also have pores under their caps, and some of them are poisonous, but boletes grow on the ground near trees, not on wood, they're much more perishable than polypores (some of the woodier species persist for years), and the layer of tubes that leads to the pores peels off from the rest of the cap easily in boletes, but not in polypores. A group of tough polypores, leathery poroid mushrooms similar to boletes, but typically lacking a distinct stalk.
The technical distinction between the two types of mushrooms is that these do not have the spore-bearing tissue continuous along the entire underside of the mushroom. Many of them are bracket fungi. The polypore growth form exists in many different evolutionary lines of higher basidiomycetes. Although many of these species are members of the Polyporales, there are many of them that belong to other groups as well.
They are often found on rotting logs, and are rot-resistant to the extent that they themselves often last long enough for moss to grow on them |
