Giant puffball mushrooms | Edible mushrooms | Biobritte mushroom company Giant puffball mushrooms Giant puffball mushrooms have possible medicinal uses as well. Remember those trillions of spores they produce? The spores are incredibly tiny.  Each spore is 3.5 to 5.5 microns (0.00014 to 0.00019 inches) in diameter. They are bone dry, making a mature giant puffball a sack of fine powder.  The Lakota tribe of Native Americans used this clean dry material in their medicine.  They would pack large wounds with puffball spores to slow bleeding and help blood clot.  The dried spores can slow bleeding if they're used as a coagulant. They were reportedly used to treat bleeding and prevent infection. The use of Calvatia gigantea in folk medicine led researchers to investigate it further. In the 1960's they isolated the substance salvation, which was shown to inhibit sarcoma in lab mice.  Calvacin is now cited as one of the first substances with antitumor activity isolated from a mushroom