Breathing New Life to a Malaysia Lost National Treasure――the Tiger-Milk Mushroom (Lignosus rhinocerotis)

摘要

Tiger-Milk Mushroom (Lignosus rhinocerotis), locally known as "cendawan susu rimau", is a well-known traditional medicinal mushroom in Malaysia, with the first record of its usage dating back to 1664. The medicinally useful part of the mushroom is the sclerotia. It is used to treat asthma, fever, cough, cancer, food poisoning, for wound healing and as a general tonic. To date, however, scientific data on this mushroom are very limited. Also, the supply of the sclerotia is very limited and could not meet the demand, because this mushroom can only be collected from jungle and its occurrence is rare. Earlier attempts to cultivate the mushroom were not successful and usually resulted in low yield. Thus, the full potential of the health and economic benefits of this' national treasure' have never been achieved. Recently, however, we have successfully cultivated the mushroom in a controlled environment with high yield. We have been able to induce the formation of sclerotia which eventually lead to development of stem and formation of the mushroom cap. The life cycle of L. rhinocerotis is 2-3 years. We have also developed a manufacturing process to produce the Tiger-Milk Mushroom sclerotia as a commercially viable product. We believe the availability of the mushroom sclerotia in large quantity with consistent quality will breathe new life into the biotechnological exploitation of this Malaysian national treasure. This paper reported the 10 years journey of the development of the L. rhinocerotis cultivar and the investigations of its biopharmacological properties as the first step to validate the medicinal benefits of the mushroom as recorded by ethno-botanical surveys.