Mushrooms: an emerging resource for therapeutic terpenoids

Mankind has always been fascinated with nature and have heavily explored natural products since the ancient times. Evolution of diseases led to research on synthetic structure, specificity and activity-guided treatment. To combat threats of new developing diseases and the deleterious side effects posed by modern therapy, researchers have once again looked back towards natural resources. Although plants have been the main source of natural drugs, lower fungi are being recently paid attention to. Among them, mushrooms have emerged as an under-explored yet immensely rich resource, especially for bioactive terpenoids. A lot of research is going on around the world with mushroom-derived terpenoids especially their medicinal properties, some of which have even been used in pre- and post-clinical studies. From the literatures that are available, it was found that mushroom terpenoids have activity against a wide range of diseases. In this review, we have summarized different mushroom-derived terpenoids and their therapeutic properties.