These are all varieties of Reishi mushrooms. I searched a lot but could not find the scientific names for all except for red reishi which is Ganoderma lucidum. Below are the colors and common names for them. I would highly appreciate if anybody can provide the scientific names for these reishi varieties:
Red reishi (akashiba)
White reishi (shiroshiba)
Black reishi (kuroshiba)
Blue reishi (aoshiba)
Yellow reishi (kishiba)
Purple reishi (murasakishiba)
There is debate as to the various colors of Reishi and the scientific names. The only one I know of to date is Ganoderma sinense for the black or purple. Odds are that the color is not necessarily related to species but to growing factors.
@ Mark Kaylor. Thanks for your response. Your answer has generated another query in my mind. According to American Herbal Pharmacopoeia, black reishi is Ganoderma japonicum. So as you suggested G. sinensis is actually black or purple?
I am attaching the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia for your ready reference. What was your source of information? Is it actually purple i.e. murasakishiba??
The best way is usually to use a Latin scientific name. However, the most important is to have genotyping of particular Ganoderma (it suppose to be more than 250 different variants of Ganoderma) and to know the exact composition (amount of specific triterpenes, polysaccharides etc). Since the amount of the biologically active compounds could be different in the same characterized Reishi (based on the growing conditions, time of the collection, processing etc.) – I personally prefer to look for the chemical characterization of the specific Ganoderma (‘fingerprint”) - if available.
@ Daniel Sliva. I am also in search of Latin Scientific names only. The common names written in parantheses are just for an additional information and to ease identification if a person knows it by its common name. I want first the identification on the basis of organoleptic characters i.e. morphological evaluation on the basis of color that a particular color belongs to which variety of Ganoderma. Red I am sure is G. lucidum. Black I have got two options G. sinensis (from Mark Kaylor's post) and G. japonicum (from AHP). Here is another thing which I suspect as Mark has written black or purple. So sinensis or japonicum might be purple also. About the other 4 colors I dont know, not even the possible names. So need to find out the same. Could you help me out on this?
Alok, There are also other Ganoderma species: e.g. G. amboinese, G. tsugae, G. collosum, G. applanatum, G. multipileum etc. However, the most studied is G. lucidum. Since the majority of them contain lanostane based triterpenes – they are usually bitter. In addition, the color should also depend on the cultivation conditions, and some variants of the group species will overlap. I hope this will help.
Red Lingzhi or red reishi is Widely assimilated to the taxon Ganoderma lucidum in the literature . Nevertheless, G. lucidum is an european species firstly described by Curtis, a long time ago in UK. According to the last molecular data the red lingzhi or red reishi and even Chi-Zhi (red zhi) from continental china was newly named Ganoderma lingzhi (Wang XC, 2012) while the red Lingzhi from Taiwan and Indonesia should match to Ganoderma multipileum (Wang DM et al., 2009), two species really different by morphologic features from the true G. lucidum. Fortunately, It is more clear for the purple lingzhi which should match to G. sinense. syn G. formosanum....these are the only certainties that we can have now
cordialy
stephane Welti
It is already difficult to attribute the true scientific name for ganoderma specimens, so, i don t want imagine the difficulty with traditional name....almost impossible in my opinion
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