Flammulina velutipes (enoki, velvet shank, golden needle mushroom or winter mushroom).

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It's one of the main edible mushrooms on the market, has long been recognized for its nutritional value and delicious taste. In recent decades, research has expanded beyond detailing its nutritional composition and delved into the biological activities and potential health benefits of its constituents. Many bioactive constituents from a range of families have been isolated from different parts of the mushroom, including carbohydrates, protein, lipids, glycoproteins, phenols, and sesquiterpenes. These compounds have been demonstrated to exhibit various biological activities, such as antitumour and anticancer activities, anti-atherosclerotic and thrombosis inhibition activity, antihypertensive and cholesterol lowering effects, anti-aging and antioxidant properties, ability to aid with restoring memory and overcoming learning deficits, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, anti-bacterial, ribosome inactivation and melanosis inhibition. This review aims to consolidate the information concerning the phytochemistry and biological activities of various compounds isolated from F. velutipes to demonstrate that this mushroom is not only a great source of nutrients but also possesses tremendous potential in pharmaceutical drug development.

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In addition to their nutritional value, folk medicine has long recognized mushrooms for their wide spectrum of therapeutic and prophylactic uses.

Many medicinal mushrooms are important ingredients in Traditional Chinese Medicine, such as Flammulina velutipes (enokitake), Lentinus edodes (shiitake), and Grifola frondosa (maitake) (Sullivan et al., 2006). While their properties remained unknown to the scientific community for a long time, in recent decades, there has been significant research focused on the sources, medicinal properties and applications of mushrooms (Encarnacion et al., 2012; Kalač, 2013; Soares et al., 2013).

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From a nutritional stand point, these health promoting mushrooms have high nutritional value.

They contain dietary fiber, are low in calories, have a high content of protein consisting of all the essential amino acids, minerals and vitamins and are free of cholesterol (Karaman et al., 2010). Beyond their nutritional value, mushrooms have great potential for production of useful metabolites, making them a prolific resource for drug isolation and development (Leung et al., 1997). Mushrooms are now gaining worldwide recognition as a functional food as well as a potential source of nutraceuticals which may reduce severity of, prevent or treat illnesses. The current research on these medicinal mushrooms has, in fact, now progressed beyond validating their traditional medical uses and into the isolation and production of bioactive compounds against specific illnesses (Wang et al., 2012c; Liu et al., 2014).

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