Falandysz et al. 2020 - Mercury in Yunnan wild and medicinal fungi

Falandysz and colleagues measured total mercury in traditionally foraged edible and medicinal fungi from Yunnan province, China, and compared low-mercury wood-decaying medicinal species with higher-mercury soft-flesh edible Boletaceae and related mushrooms. The study is occurrence evidence for total mercury in wild mushrooms, medicinal mushroom materials, and mushroom-derived capsule exposure scenarios; it does not report methylmercury concentrations in the occurrence table.

Key numbers

The abstract reports 42 fungal species collected during 2011-2017. Polypore fungi were usually below 0.1 mg/kg dry weight, while two higher polypore values were 0.11 +/- 0.01 mg/kg dw in Ganoderma applanatum and 0.24 +/- 0.00 mg/kg dw in Amauroderma niger, both from the Nujiang/Lanping area.

Table 1 reports mercury in caps, stipes, or whole fruiting bodies. Selected high and low values include:

The results section states that many Boletaceae-family species had mercury concentrations from one to three orders of magnitude higher than the wood-decaying species. Several high-cap examples were B. bicolor up to 8.6 +/- 0.4 mg/kg dw, B. bainiugan up to 14 +/- 0 mg/kg dw, B. speciosus up to 6.4 +/- 0.1 mg/kg dw, B. subsplendidus up to 12 +/- 1 mg/kg dw, C. calopus up to 9.8 +/- 0.3 mg/kg dw, T. felleus up to 7.2 +/- 0.4 mg/kg dw, and Xerocomus sp. up to 6.8 +/- 0.3 mg/kg dw.

For exposure scenarios, the authors assumed 3 x 0.5 g of capsulated dried product per person per day and meal sizes of 100 to 300 g, with a maximum 500 g, for Boletaceae mushrooms. Worst-case estimates were 0.006 micrograms/kg body mass per day for hard polypore products and 0.25 micrograms/kg body mass per day for soft-flesh Boletaceae capsule products. For meals, estimated intakes were 17, 50, and 83 micrograms/kg body mass, corresponding on a weekly basis to 120, 350, and 580 micrograms/kg body mass.

Methods (brief)

The authors collected wild mushroom species from 23 sites in Yunnan and analyzed whole fruiting bodies or separated caps and stipes depending on species. Samples were cleaned, dried at 65 degrees C to constant mass, ground, sieved, and stored dry. Forest topsoil profiles were collected at Zhenyuan in 2015 and at Changning and Dulong in 2016. Mercury was reported as total Hg on a dry-weight basis.

Implications

Certification: This source can support total-mercury occurrence context for wild mushrooms, medicinal mushroom materials, and mushroom supplement/capsule products. It should not be used as methylmercury occurrence evidence unless paired with a source-specific speciation study.

Courses: Useful for explaining species-specific fungal bioaccumulation, cap-versus-stipe differences, and why dry-weight mushroom data need careful conversion before comparison with wet-food limits.

App: Can inform wild-mushroom and mushroom-supplement mercury priors, especially for Yunnan/China-sourced materials and Boletaceae-heavy products.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• wild-mushrooms
• cultivated-mushrooms
• dietary-supplements
• supplements-botanicals-herbs
• supplements-oral-solids-capsules
• mushrooms
• wild-mushrooms
• herbal-botanicals
• mercury-total
• mercury

Verification notes

This page was built from the PDF title/byline, abstract, methods, Table 1, results, exposure-estimation discussion, and topsoil context. The page uses tHg because the reported mushroom occurrence values are total mercury; the discussion mentions methylmercury toxicology but does not provide mushroom methylmercury occurrence rows. Values are dry weight unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.