| A large volume of literature is available on basic and applied mycology, covering aspects such as taxonomy and phylogeny, physiology, biochemistry, comparative morphology, genetics and molecular biology, pathology, and fungal metabolites including mycotoxins and ecology. Mycology is also often a significant component in studies of foods, biodeterioration, and health publications. A stable, reliable taxonomy for the fungi is a prerequisite for workers in all of these disciplines, to facilitate communication and to allow comparisons to be made between different subject areas. But until now, the various aspects of chemical fungal taxonomy had never been covered in one book. |
| Historically, fungal taxonomy has developed from classical botanical approaches, and most taxonomic characters are based on morphological attributes or associations with particular hosts. However, chemical methods have played an important role in the taxonomy of yeasts, where there are few morphological features, and in the taxonomy of lichens and some lichen-associated fungi. Chemical taxonomy, in its broadest sense, has often been limited to a small number of filamentous microfungi, although the application of some chemical and physiological characters in wider taxonomic schemes is becoming more common. For example, immunological methods are widely used for the diagnosis of fungal diseases in animals and are now considered for the diagnosis of a wide range of plant pathogenic fungi. |
| Recent developments in molecular biology have resulted in new techniques, such as restriction site mapping, becoming widely available in biological laboratories. The incorporation of such methods in systematics has revolutionized many taxonomic schemes, allowing the characterization of individual isolates while also permitting phylogenetic and other evolutionary inferences to be made. |
| One disadvantage to the adoption of new techniques is that they have often been undertaken by specialists. As a result, chemical and molecular biology approaches in systematics have been applied independently, so comparisons between such schemes, and with those based on classical characters, are difficult |
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