Mushroom heteropolysaccharides: A review on their sources, structure and biological effects

Mushrooms have been largely studied not only by their d-glucans, but also because they present a class of more complex polymers: the heteropolysaccharides. Heteropolysaccharides show variability on their monosaccharide composition, anomeric configuration, linkage and branching type, besides some of these molecules can present natural methylated monosaccharides and also acid monosaccharides, which enhance the difficulty of the purification and characterization of their structure. As a result of such complexity, mushroom heteropolysaccharides can be considered an interesting source of molecules with medicinal and industrial applications. Consequently a plenty of new researches has been published in the past 12 years about the isolation, chemical characterization and biological activities of heteropolysaccharides from mushrooms, especially from Basidiomycetes. Therefore, this review intends to organize and classify the information described up to now about such polysaccharides obtained from different sources of mushroom-forming fungi, Basidiomycetes, Ascomycetes and Hybrid mushrooms, and provides a brief reflection on how the chemical studies have been carried out.