A Review on Cultivation and Pharmacological Potential of White Button Mushroom (Agaricus bisporus)

Nature has been a source of medicinal agents for thousands of years and an impressive number of modern drugs have been isolated from natural sources, based on their use in traditional medicine. Since ancient time’s plants as well as fungus sources of medicinal compounds have continued to play a dominant role in maintenance of human health. Over 50% of all modern clinical drugs are of natural product origin and play an important role in drug development programs in the pharmaceutical industry. Mushrooms are highly nutritious and environment friendly crops that carry numerous medicinal benefits. The cultivation of edible mushrooms carries great relevance in todays’ world in the context of a growing population and extreme pressure on the environment. White button mushroom (Agaricus bisporus) is a very important nutritional and medicinal species which is used for recycling agro wastes including wheat straw, reed plant wastes, waste paper, oat straw, waste tea leaves, some water plants and others. The standardized cultivation techniques to be followed for cultivation laboratory scale button mushroom are as follows (i). compost to be prepared by short method of composting (ii). Cultivation trials of A. bisporus to be carried out in a closed room provided with air conditioner as source of cooling (iii). The relative humidity inside the cropping rooms to be maintained to 60-70% (iv). Spawn run will be completed in 15 days and required 12-15 days more for case run. These findings revealed that button mushroom can possibly be cultivated under laboratory condition. This can be a means of livelihood and a source of economic empowerment for women in both urban and rural areas and for small holder farmers, apart from being a source of food production. However, there is resurgence to propel efforts in terms of improvement of tools available to the breeder, decoding mushroom genome for new strain development in the future for the welfare of commercial pressure facing industry.