Plant Family
Physalacriaceae
Enoki's family — long-stemmed wood-rotters that glow in the dark and include the largest living organism on record.
Wood-rotting gilled fungi with rooting stems, spanning the cultivated enoki, the bioluminescent honey fungus, and the aggressive tree pathogen Armillaria.
5 Notable Members
Overview
The Rooting-Shank Family
Gilled wood-rotting fungi, many with a long stem that tapers into a root-like extension running down to buried wood. The family is best known for two very different members: the cultivated enoki, grown in the dark and in carbon dioxide to produce the pale, slender clusters sold in supermarkets, and Armillaria, the honey fungus.
Armillaria deserves its reputation. It spreads through soil by black bootlace-like rhizomorphs, is a destructive pathogen of living trees, and includes the largest organism ever measured — a single clonal individual in Oregon covering close to ten square kilometres. Several members of the family are also bioluminescent: the glow of Armillaria-infected wood is the phenomenon behind foxfire.
Shared Traits
How to Recognise It
In Practice
Medical Significance
Enoki’s contribution is a protein rather than a polysaccharide. FIP-fve is a fungal immunomodulatory protein, and one of the best-characterised Th1-skewing molecules in fungal medicine — a defined, sequenced, structurally resolved molecule, which is rare in this field where most actives are heterogeneous glucan fractions. The evidence remains preclinical.
Armillaria mellea has a distinct place in Chinese medicine, partly in its own right and partly because it is the obligate symbiotic host of Gastrodia elata — tianma — which cannot grow without it. That relationship makes the fungus indirectly responsible for one of the more important herbs in the Chinese neurological repertoire.
Enoki is a food with a long record, but it is worth knowing that raw enoki contains flammutoxin, a pore-forming cytolysin destroyed by cooking. Cultivated enoki has also been a repeated source of listeriosis outbreaks, which is a food-hygiene problem rather than a toxicological one and is resolved by cooking. Wild Armillaria is edible only when thoroughly cooked and causes gastrointestinal upset in a proportion of people regardless.
Phytochemistry
Characteristic Chemistry
FIP-fve is the family’s distinctive molecule. Enoki also supplies ergosterol and 22,23-dihydroergosterol, adenosine, and flammutoxin. Armillaria produces sesquiterpene aryl esters (the melleolins) with antifungal activity, and the family’s bioluminescent members share the fungal luciferin pathway built on hispidin.
Beyond the Database
Also in This Family
Notable members without a monograph yet.
Keep Exploring