Peer-reviewed original paper | Advanced Science | Published 6 October 2026.
Exact tested intervention. Dry fruiting bodies of Ganoderma applanatum from Changbai Mountain, China; identity confirmed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and voucher CCFM20221205 retained. Material underwent hot-water extraction, ethanol precipitation, DEAE anion-exchange chromatography and Superdex 75 size-exclusion chromatography. The principal fraction, GAP2, was the 0.2 mol/L NaCl-eluted fraction: a roughly 20.5 kDa linear beta-(1→3)-glucan, concentrated and lyophilized.
Dose, model and comparators. In the main screen, male C57BL/6j mice received 3% DSS plus crude polysaccharides (300 mg/kg by gavage) or GAP1–GAP4 (50 mg/kg by gavage); model controls received PBS or saline. Randomized groups began at n=10, with reported endpoint subsets commonly n=5–7. Further randomized experiments used germ-free mice, fecal microbiota transfer, filtered fecal metabolites, Phocaeicola vulgatus FTJS7K1, and GH16/fabB knockout strains.
Outcomes. GAP2 improved weight recovery, colon length, histology, mucin and tight-junction markers in DSS-treated mice. In germ-free mice, direct GAP1/GAP2 dosing was largely null; transfer of microbiota or filtered metabolites from treated donors restored effects. The authors link GAP2 fermentation by P. vulgatus to tridecylic acid production and Rho/CDC42-associated tight-junction signalling.
Design quality. Strengths include intervention fractionation, structural characterization, random allocation, blinded histology, germ-free transfer experiments and bacterial gene knockouts. Public Chinese research grants funded the work; the authors declared no conflicts.
Limits and bias. This remains a set of small animal and cell experiments using an acute chemical colitis model. No preregistration or power calculation is reported. The human datasets are observational and did not measure the proposed metabolite or host signalling. The Rho/CDC42 step was not tested with pathway blockade, and the Caco-2 methods section appears to label the fatty-acid exposure as myristic acid rather than tridecylic acid — a reporting inconsistency worth clarification.
Interpretation. This is a reasonably strong mechanistic advance for one purified fraction. It is not independent clinical replication and cannot be generalized to whole fruiting body, mycelium, crude extracts, other Ganoderma species or retail products.