Polyporus squamosus mushroom, free radical scavenger, antioxidants, DPPH assay, Catalase, Superoxide Dismutase, Glutathione-S-transferase

Recently, an increasing interest in searching natural antioxidant sources has led to extensive studies on mushrooms. In this study, Polyporus squamosus was examined for determination of its total phenolic and flavonoid contents. The free radical scavenging property was then evaluated by DPPH assay and finally the effect of Polyporus squamousus was tested on catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione- S-transferase (GST).In this study, four different mushroom extracts have been prepared using cold water, hot water, methanol, and ethanol. It was observed that cold water extract resulted in the highest contents of total phenolic and flavonoid (as 223.60 μg GAE /ml and 61.25 μg QE /ml respectively), Therefore, the cold water extract was used for further experiments.Based on the results obtained, it was found that DPPH radical scavenging capacity of mushroom extract is relatively low with 35% and IC50 value was 20.55 g/l with respect to quercetin and gallic acid as standards. In order to evaluate the antioxidant property of Polyporus squamosus extract, its effect on catalase, superoxide dismutase and glutathione-S-transferase was observed. It was found that the cold water extract of Poluporus squamosus had about 60% activation on catalase with respect to control and IC50 value of 2.810 g/l and surprisingly it had an activation effect as high as 95% and IC50 value was 11.94 g/l on SOD but nearly no effect on inhibition of GSTvwith the inhibitory percent with respect to control found to be just around 7.2% and IC50 value was 1.089 g/l.