12th Pacific Science Inter-Congress, 8-12 July 2013
University of the South Pacific, Laucala Bay Campus, Suva, Fiji
Ethnomycological leads to bioactive myco-chemicals in mushrooms from Papua New Guinea
Stewart W Wossa1,2 and Russell A Barrow1
1Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia.
2School of Science and Technology, The University of Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea
Mushrooms are the macroscopic fruiting bodies that are part of the Kingdom Fungi, which constitutes a major component of the biodiversity on the island of New Guinea. Associated with this biodiversity is the equally diverse ethnological knowledge on the traditional use and appreciation of mushrooms by indigenous tribes for food and medicine. As part of an ongoing research to document these ethnomycological knowledge’s amongst the different mycophillic tribal communities, we noted the intrinsic and highly intertwined relationship between the peoples and their forest resources as shown in the well structured and applied ethnotaxonomic classification and naming systems of the forest flora and fauna, including mushrooms. The flora and fauna were noted to form unique lexemic classification in accordance with the universality model proposed earlier whereas mushroom ethnotaxonomy, although had elements of the universality models, made references to the flora and fauna as the basis for their ethnotaxonomic classification. The ethnopharmacological and medicinal knowledge relating to the use of mushrooms had more spiritual affinity as opposed to the currently accepted definitions and symptoms of diseases in modern diagnostic medicine.
Our ongoing works to isolate and identify chemical compounds in mushrooms have shown compounds having unique molecular and structural architecture with interesting biological activities as potential antibiotic and anticancer agents. In a study on a species of Boletopsis (Boletopsis sp., Family Bankeraceae, Order Thelephorales), the observations of the prevalent occurrences of polyhydroxylated p-terphenyl class of compounds has led us to establish the chemotaxonomic relationship across its sister families. Such chemotaxonomic relationship was established on the basis of the degree of esterification of the polyhydroxylated p-terphenyls and the carboxylic acid components of the esters across the sister taxonomic groupings.
Key Words: ethnomycology, ethnotaxonomy, Boletopsis sp., Bankeraceae, p-terphenyl compounds, chemotaxonomy