A mushroom isn't built like a plant. Each of its cells sits inside a tough wall made mostly of chitin and glucans, and those pieces are cross-linked to one another.
Whatever you want out of a mushroom sits behind that wall. Getting past it is the first job of an extraction, and it's why we extract with ultrasound.
What the wall is made of
Chitin is one of the two main parts of the wall. A 2011 study measured it in mushrooms and mushroom mycelium from several species and found between 0.4 and 9.8 grams of chitin per 100 grams of dry material, depending on the species.
Chitosan comes up alongside it a lot. It's chitin with the acetyl groups removed, and researchers have found it a wide range of biomedical uses. The same 2011 study looked for chitosan in its mushroom samples and didn't find any. The longer story of chitin, where else it turns up and what it's used for, is in our piece on what chitin is.
The other main part of the wall is glucan, chains of glucose. The most common kind in edible mushrooms has a backbone joined at one position, called 1,3, with side branches hanging off at another, called 1,6. Oats and barley have beta-glucans too, and it's the same name on the label, but it's a different molecule. Cereal beta-glucans are joined 1,3 and 1,4, and they don't carry the 1,6 branches at all.
Why boiling water isn't enough
In a 2014 study, researchers took apart the cell wall of one mushroom species, Pleurotus tuber-regium, by dissolving it in stages. The wall came apart in four fractions.
Boiling water pulled out only the first, about 4 percent of the wall. The biggest fraction, more than half the wall, came out only in hot alkali, a strong chemical bath. The last fraction, chitin bound to glucan, didn't dissolve in any of them. Glucans vary from species to species, so that is one wall, not a rule for every mushroom. It does show how much a wall can hold back from water and heat alone.
How ultrasound breaks the wall open
Ultrasound doesn't try to dissolve the wall. It breaks it open.
Ultrasound is sound pitched above hearing, sent through the liquid the mushroom is sitting in. As the wave passes, it pulls the liquid apart into tiny bubbles, the bubbles grow, and then they collapse. Researchers call that cavitation. A bubble collapsing against tissue can break it into smaller pieces, wear away its surface and open pores in it. The shear and turbulence from all that collapsing help break down cell walls, and once a wall is broken, what's inside can get out into the liquid.
You can see it happen in mushrooms under a microscope:
- Lion's Mane, extracted in water (2026). Ultrasound partly peeled back the outer layers of the cell wall and left fibre-like structures showing. More of the proteins that sit in the cells' membranes came out, and they came through largely intact.
- Wood ear, Auricularia cornea (2019). After three hours in 90 °C water, the leftover mushroom looked much like untreated mushroom. After 40 minutes of ultrasound at 70 °C, it showed more broken cells. Ultrasound pulled out as much as the long hot-water soak in under a quarter of the time, and what it pulled out was purer: more polysaccharide, less of everything else.
- Reishi spores (2014). A reishi spore has a tough two-layer wall. Sonication left the spores cracked, fractured and broken apart: 45 percent of them broken, and almost 75 percent when the sonication was done in an ice bath.
Our extracts
That's why we extract with ultrasound.
We start with the whole mushroom. Our Lion's Mane is extracted fresh, not dried. Every bottle comes from a triple-fraction, multi-phase exhaustive extraction built around ultrasound. There's no alcohol and there are no solvents, and our extracts are nano-encapsulated.
We've extracted with ultrasound since March 2022. We moved to it after a customer at one of our first farmers markets told us our early batch was hard to take, and we've built every bottle around it since.
We grow our own Lion's Mane and part of our Reishi, and our wild mushrooms come from one wildcrafter in Michigan. We extract all of it ourselves, so we know every bottle from the mushroom to the finished extract.
Making it smaller
In food science, ultrasound has a second use. It's used to make emulsions, breaking oily droplets down until they reach the scale of nanometres. How small they end up depends on the recipe, and past a certain point, running the sound longer stops making them any smaller.
It's also used to make liposomes, tiny bubbles of lecithin that can carry a compound that doesn't dissolve well in water. Sound breaks big liposomes into smaller ones, and food-grade versions can be made from lecithin with glycerol added. A liposome made with glycerol in the water is what researchers call a glycerosome.
Researchers encapsulate triterpenes because they dissolve so poorly. In a rat study, a coated liposome form of oleanolic acid, a compound that dissolves poorly in water, reached higher blood levels than a standard tablet. We haven't found a published human study of an encapsulated mushroom extract. A small human study did find that ganoderic acids from a plain water extract of reishi were absorbed quickly.
The other question is which part of the mushroom goes in: what a fruiting body is, and how it differs from mycelium.
Sources
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