Anti-Tumor Cell Growth by Extracts of Two Wild-Collected Mushrooms

Kit L Chin¹, Santosh Khanal², Gerald R Hankins²*, Venu Perla² and Yadong Qi¹

¹SUAREC, Southern University Land Grant Campus, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
²Department of Biology, West Virginia State University, Institute, Wes Virginia, USA

*Corresponding Author: Gerald R Hankins, Department of Biology, West Virginia State University, Institute, Wes Virginia, USA.

Received: March 13, 2018; Published: April 24, 2018

Citation: Gerald R Hankins., et al. “Anti-Tumor Cell Growth by Extracts of Two Wild-Collected Mushrooms". Acta Scientific Agriculture 2.5 (2018).

Abstract

  Phytochemicals of many edible mushrooms are known to exhibit anti-tumor activities. The extracts of two wild-collected mushrooms, Cantharellus cibarius and Boletus edulis, known to contain a variety of phytochemicals with a diverse spectrum of biological activities were used for the evaluation of their effects on cell viability of four cancer cell lines (A172 glioblastoma, U87 glioblastoma, CH157-MN meningioma and PAN-C1 pancreatic) and one NIH3T3 fibroblast cell line. The WST-8, Crystal Violet and CyQUANT assays were used to in-vitro evaluate the cell viability of the respective cell line plated onto 96 well plates followed by the mushroom extract treatments. The combined methanol, neutral saline and hot water extracts of C. cibarius, and the neutral saline and hot water extracts of B. edulis, respectively were used in the assays. The assay was conducted using five concentrations of the mushroom extracts, namely 0, 10, 100, 1,000 and 2,000 ug/mL over three days. While there were some variant results, treatments with high concentrations of C. cibarius extracts resulted in ignificantly reduced number of viable cancer cells for all cell lines tested. Treatments with high concentrations of B. edulis extracts of neutral saline and hot water, respectively resulted in significantly reduced number of viable cells. Caspase activation is known as a signature of Apoptosis. Three assay methods produced similar results on cancer cell viability. The FAM-FLICA caspase activation assay was used to determine the effectiveness of the C. cibariu mushroom extract in inciting apoptosis. The caspase activation assay results indicated that mushroom extracts did likely account to some extent, for reduced viability of cancer cells.

Keywords: Anti-tumor; Cantharellus cibarius; Boletus edulis; Wild Mushroom; In Vitro; Bioactivity

Copyright: © 2018 Gerald R Hankins., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.