Abstract

Mushrooms are underexploited and efforts to domesticate them are not yielding enough results as over 95% of consumed mushrooms in Africa and most of the world is still collected from the wild. Their utility has been hampered by incorrect morphological and biochemical identifications. Thus, this research was centered on investigating the bioactive contents and antioxidant activities of molecularly identified wild mushrooms from the southeast region of Nigeria. Fifty samples of wildgrowing mushrooms were collected using opportunistic sampling method in 5 states of the country. Standard methods were used to analyze the bioactive contents and antioxidant activities. Significant (P ≤ 0.05) variations were recorded in the bioactive compounds and antioxidant activities of the sampled mushrooms. The bioactive compounds expressed in mg 100g-1 revealed that phenols (58.15 ± 0.030 to 1599.45 ± 0.027) were the highest, while lutein (0.00 ± 0.000 to 265 ± 0.029) was the least. However, flavonoids (15 ± 0.008 to 753 ± 0.017) and beta-carotene (19.66 ± 0.019 to 261.44 ± 0.017) were also detected in appreciable quantities. The antioxidant activities ranged from 0.00 ± 0.000–61.55 ± 0.041 (50 mg mL-1 ), 0.00 ± 0.000– 69.28 ± 0.029 (75 mg mL-1 ) and 0.00 ± 0.000–74.62 ± 0.029 (100 mg mL-1 ). The sampled wild mushrooms have proven excellent sources of bioactive compounds and antioxidant properties which can be beneficial to human health, while the use of molecular markers (ITS region) was effective in proper identifications of the wild mushrooms.