Nutritional value and antibacterial activity of desert truffle Tirmania pinoyi (Maire) Malençon (1973) growing wild in Lybia
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abstract
Mushrooms are widely appreciated for their nutraceutical value, since edible species are widely
consumed all over the world. They have a long history of use for their health promotion benefits
(Zaidman et al., 2005). Fungal species are considered to be a good source of many different
compounds belonging to unsaturated fatty acids, phenolic compounds, tocopherols, proteins, and other
bioactive metabolites (Barros et al. 2009). In recent years reports on the chemistry, and the nutritional
and functional properties of mushroom have been overwhelming and more than 300 articles related to
mushrooms have been published in the last two decades (Rathee et al., 2012).The golden age of
antibiotic discovery is the 20th century and these potent drugs indisputably saved millions of lives.
Nevertheless, we are entering an era when bacterial infections might no longer be successfully treated
with commercially available antibiotics; overuse of antimicrobial drugs resulted in the emergence and
spreading of multidrug and even pan-resistant pathogenic microorganisms (Carlet et al., 2011), so the
search for new antimicrobial agents must be continued. Antimicrobial potential of mushrooms is still
poorly investigated and available literature (Ofodile et al., 201 1; Bala et al., 201 1) indicates that
further chemical analyzes of mushrooms is required to support studies searching for mushroom
derived antimicrobial agents.
Desert truffles, though less appreciated in cuisine than the European forest ones, are nonetheless
true truffles in the sense that they are hypogeous (underground) ascomycete fungi, as opposed to
hypogeous basidiomycete fungi, termed false truffles. The best known and appreciated genera Terfezia
and Tirmania were shown to belong to the Pezizaceae rather than to the distinctly hypogeous
Terfeziaceae family, which has been abolished (Norman and Egger, 1999).
The main goals of our study were to investigate nutraceutical value, sugars and fatty acids
composition of Tirmania pinoyi, as well as to determine antibacterial properties of its methanol extract
dissolved in three different solvent systems.
