Abstract: Edible mushroom has a long history of culinary and medicinal use in China, and polysaccharides have complex chemical structures and are recognized as the major functional constituents of edible mushroom. Currently, there are many methods available to analyze polysaccharides, and each has its own distinctive features. Recently, much new progress has been made in research on polysaccharides from edible mushroom using various analytical methods. However, the currently available methods to analyze edible mushroom polysaccharides have scarcely been systematically and comprehensively reviewed in the literature. Through a systematic retrieval from searches of databases such as Web of Science, PubMed, SciFinder Academic, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), we summarize the literature over the past 20 years describing methods for the extraction, isolation, purification, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of edible mushroom polysaccharides, and we present a comparative evaluation of the different methods, aiming to provide reference for in-depth studies on edible mushroom polysaccharides.

Key words: edible mushroom; polysaccharides; extraction; isolation; quantitative analysis; qualitative analysis