Assessment of the anti-leukemic and antioxidant potential of the methanol extract of a wild, edible, and novel mushroom, Astraeus hygrometricus, and unraveling its metabolomic profile

Mushrooms are enriched with a plethora of bioactive molecules that play a vital role in the prevention of human diseases. The balance between ROS generation and cancer growth is one of the main prerequisites for efficient cancer treatment. In this study, to testify the aforesaid theory, five wild edible mushrooms were initially screened based on their anti-proliferative efficiency, and the best mushroom extract was selected for the assessment of their antioxidant potentialities in vitro in various artificially generated free radicals such as DPPH, ABTS+, and by FRAP experiment. The reason behind the antiproliferative potentiality and antioxidant capability of the most potent extract was also correlated by profiling its metabolites through GC-MS analysis. The study reveals, that the methanolic extract of Astraeus hygrometricus is the most potent anti-leukemic extract (IC50 22.7 ±0.23 µg/mL) followed by Serpula sp. (75.7 ±0.44 µg/mL), Phallus sp. (60.53±0.36 µg/mL), Tricholoma sp. (53.76±0.46 µg/mL), Lentinus sp. (58 ±0.13 µg/mL) against the Jurkat cell line with negligible effect on normal PBMC cells isolated from healthy donors. The assessment of the antioxidant profile Astraeus hygrometricus reveals its moderate antioxidant efficacy against several artificially generated free radicals, such as DPPH (76.9±0.16 µg/mL), ABTS+ (142±0.66 µg/mL) and moderate iron chelating efficacy (32.37±2.31µM). The GC-MS analysis of both methanol and ethyl acetate extracts of Astraeus hygrometricus have found 53 and 52 compounds respectively, with wide diverse ranges of chemically classified biomolecules such as alkane, alcohol, fatty acid, organic acid, polycyclic and heterocyclic compounds, amino acid, vitamin, and hormone, etc. with a wide array of biological activity such as anticancer and antioxidant potentiality. In conclusion, it can be said that these wild edible mushroom Astraeus hygrometricus are a repository of novel biomolecules that can be used in the treatment of Leukemia in the future.