Medicinal Polypores Indigenous to the Pacific Northwest Old Growth Forests of North America: Screening for Novel Antiviral Activity

摘要

Polypore mushrooms have been used medicinally for thousands of yeark The Greek Physician Dioscorides first described the use of a wood conk, Agarikon now known as Fomitopsis officinalis as a treatment against consumption in 65 AD. Its use a topical anti-inflammatory agent also spans millennia. Other wood conks such as ling chi or reishi have had a similarly long history of use in Asia. In the past twenty years, wood conks are being carefully explored for their immunomodulating and anti-cancer properties. More recently, mushrooms, including polypores, have and are being explored for their antimicrobial properties. Upon submitting more than a hundred in vitro cultures of mushrooms to the U.S. Defense Departments' Bioshield BioDefense program, several tests show some of these polypore mushrooms have strong anti-viral activity. Within these verdant natural landscapes, trees hundreds of years old host ancestral strains of these elusive polypores. Species that are now rare, or in some cases thought to be extinct, still reside in the pristine old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest of North America. When clones from these mushrooms were grown in vitro and submitted for antiviral screening, several mycelial cultures produce antibiotics effective against Pox and other viruses. Notably strains vary in their antiviral properties. Our natural genomes hold within them great potentials for staving off disease and have not yet been fully explored. The fungal diversity within these genomes may prove critical for isolating the most active strains, similar to the lessons learned from the isolation of Penicillium chrysogenum strains that lead to the commercialization of penicillin, subsequently saving millions of lives. With deforestation, pollution, and industrialization, societies should re-evaluate the importance of their natural forests in the context that they hold within them novel medicines of enormous socio-economic importance. The old paradigm of viewing the forest as valuable only in terms of timber seems overly simplistic given this new knowledge.