Buchbeschreibung
In: Sydowia 75, (2023): 151-179; ISSN 0082-0598, DOI 10.12905/0380.sydowia75-2023-0151, Published online on January 31, 2023
Myco-antioxidants: insights into the natural metabolic treasure and their biological effects
Hebatallah H. Abo Nahas 1, Mohamed A. Abdel-Rahman 1, Vijai K. Gupta 2 & Ahmed M. Abdel-Azeem 3, *
1 Zoology Department, Faculty of Science, Suez Canal University, Ismailia 41522, Egypt
2 Biorefining and Advanced Materials Research Center, SRUC, Kings Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh EH9 3JG, UK
3 Botany and Microbiology Department, Faculty of Science, Suez Canal University, Ismailia 41522, Egypt
* e-mail: ahmed_abdelazeem@science.suez.edu.eg
Abo Nahas H.H., Abdel-Rahman M.A., Gupta V.K. & Abdel-Azeem A.M. (2023) Myco-antioxidants: insights into the natural
metabolic treasure and their biological effects. – Sydowia 75: 151–179.
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.