Edible Mushrooms – Harnessing Nature’s Natural Pesticide

Through the BioMed Research International, scientists have found edible mushrooms to be a sustainable tool for the control of parasitic nematodes affecting agriculture and livestock industry.

Nematodes are organisms living in the soil and animals’ guts where they may live as parasites severely affecting economically important crops and farm animals, thus causing economic losses to worldwide agriculture.

Traditionally, parasitic nematodes have been controlled using commercial pesticides and anthelmintic (AH) drugs. The overuse of commercial pesticides have not only lead to extensive environmental damages, they have also caused the nematodes to become resilient, reducing the usefulness of many commercial drugs.

Edible mushrooms have been explored as a successful, less harmful “pesticide” to use on livestock and agriculture.

Studies have identified ten species of gilled fungi, including the oyster mushroom, who have the ability to produced tiny droplets from structures in their mycelium (A mycelium is a network of fungal threads or hyphae), which supposedly contained a nematotoxin. When rhabditid nematodes touched those droplets containing nematotoxin, they suffered alterations in their head structure, causing the displacement of the esophagus
, and/or altered the tissues surrounding the esophagus in less than a minute. The nematodes then become immobilized, and the directional hyphae penetrates the body orifices, colonizing, and digesting the nematode.

In one study, the results showed that nematodes were paralyzed by 95.8% in an 8 h confrontation period.

This indicates a strong potential to harness the fractions and extractions of edible mushrooms to use in biotechnological application, providing an environmentally safer and more effective means of managing the control of animal and plant parasitic nematodes.

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