Medicinal Fungi and Soil: Interactions, Plant Interactions, and Ecological Restoration for Sustainable Use: A Review.

Abstract

Medicinal fungi are widely used in Chinese traditional medicine for their various medicinal effects. Soil has an irreplaceable effect on most medicinal fungi. The purpose of this study is to sum up the relationship between medicinal fungi and soil. We obtained high-quality literatures of last two decades from PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science and Springer with keywords including "medicinal fungi," "fungi," "medicinal mushroom," and "soil," and Latin names of some common medicinal fungi. Different medicinal fungi are adapted to different soil environments, and different soil environments affect medicinal fungi. In addition, medicinal fungi could have a positive or negative effect on the nearby plants via soil. Furthermore, medicinal fungi played a role in soil ecological restoration. Finally, future directions are proposed: firstly, researchers are supposed to use advanced methods including high-resolution sequencing methods and the confirmatory factor analysis method; secondly, researchers should include more research content to improve the integrity of the study, such as the micro-foodwebs in soil; thirdly, medicinal fungi can be used as multi-purpose soil amendments.