Wild edible mushrooms are distributed all over the world and are delicious seasonal foods, rich in polysaccharides, amino acids, vitamins, and other components. At the same time, they contain many essential trace elements and are highly enriched in heavy metals (compared to green plants and cultivated edible mushrooms). Consumers may be exposed to health risks due to excessive heavy metals in the process of consumption. This is also one of the important factors affecting the import and export of edible mushrooms, which is of great concern to consumers and entry and exit inspection and quarantine departments. In this paper, the contents of four essential trace elements of iron, manganese, zinc, and copper and four harmful heavy metals of cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic in nearly 400 species of wild edible mushrooms from 10 countries are reviewed. It was found that the factors affecting the elemental content of edible mushrooms are mainly divided into internal and external factors. Internal is mainly the difference in species element-enrichment ability, and external is mainly environmental pollution and geochemical factors. The aim is to provide a reference for the risk assessment of edible mushrooms and their elemental distribution characteristics.

Due to the existence of Lingzhi adulteration, there is a growing demand for species classification of medicinal mushrooms by various techniques. The objective of this study was to explore a rapid and reliable way to distinguish between different Lingzhi species and compare the influence of data pretreatment methods on the recognition results. To this end, 120 fresh fruiting bodies of Lingzhi were collected, and all of them were analyzed by attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). Random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) classification models were established for raw and pretreated second derivative (SD) spectral matrices to authenticate different Lingzhi species. The results of multivariate statistical analysis indicated that the SD preprocessing method displayed a higher classification ability, which may be attributed to the analysis of powder samples that requires removal of overlapping peaks and baseline shifts. Compared with RF, the results of the SVM and PLS-DA methods were more satisfying, and their accuracies for the test set were both 100%. Among SVM and PLS-DA, the training set and test set accuracy of PLS-DA were both 100%. In conclusion, ATR-FTIR spectroscopy data pretreated by SD combined with PLS-DA is a simple, rapid, non-destructive and relatively inexpensive method to discriminate between mushroom species and provide a good reference to quality assessment.

Origin traceability is an important step to control the nutritional and pharmacological quality of food products. Boletus edulis mushroom is a well-known food resource in the world. Its nutritional and medicinal properties are drastically varied depending on geographical origins. In this study, three sensor systems (inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrophotometer (ICP-AES), ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) and Fourier transform mid-infrared spectroscopy (FT-MIR)) were applied for the origin traceability of 184 mushroom samples (caps and stipes) in combination with chemometrics. The difference between cap and stipe was clearly illustrated based on a single sensor technique, respectively. Feature variables from three instruments were used for origin traceability. Two supervised classification methods, partial least square discriminant analysis (FLS-DA) and grid search support vector machine (GS-SVM), were applied to develop mathematical models. Two steps (internal cross-validation and external prediction for unknown samples) were used to evaluate the performance of a classification model. The result is satisfactory with high accuracies ranging from 90.625% to 100%. These models also have an excellent generalization ability with the optimal parameters. Based on the combination of three sensory systems, our study provides a multi-sensory and comprehensive origin traceability of B. edulis mushrooms.

Edible mushrooms are healthy food with high nutritional value, which is popular with consumers. With the increase of the problem of mushrooms being confused with the real and pollution in the market, people pay more and more attention to food safety. More than 167 articles of edible mushroom published in the past 20 years were reviewed in this paper. The analysis tools and data analysis methods of identification and quality evaluation of edible mushroom species, origin, mineral elements were reviewed. Five techniques for identification and evaluation of edible mushrooms were introduced and summarized. The macroscopic, microscopic and molecular identification techniques can be used to identify species. Chromatography, spectroscopy technology combined with chemometrics can be used for qualitative and quantitative study of mushroom and evaluation of mushroom quality. In addition, multiple supervised pattern-recognition techniques have good classification ability. Deep learning is more and more widely used in edible mushroom, which shows its advantages in image recognition and prediction. These techniques and analytical methods can provide strong support and guarantee for the identification and evaluation of mushroom, which is of great significance to the development and utilization of edible mushroom.