Good practices for preserve biodiversity of mycotoxigenic fungi.

In recent years a rising common concern is looking at biodiversity concept with a new sight, attempting to evaluate its economical value, as ground step for supporting measures proposed by national governments and international committees. Although this utilitarian view applied to a complex concept could cause an underestimation of the true potential of biological resources, nowadays a wide spectrum of direct and indirect quantifiable values has been recognized as tightly correlated to biodiversity. Microorganism like fungi play a major role in bio-regulatory systems and could represent an extraordinary source of biodiversity and of new compounds; particular relevance is occupied worldwide by strains belonging to toxigenic genera of Aspergillus, Alternaria, Fusarium, and Penicillium representing a great biodiversity for fungal biology. A critical aspect is the quick deposition and right preservation of "wild" toxigenic fungal strains (TFS) in order to avoid potential loss of their metabolic profile, toxigenicity and pathogenicity . In addition, the biochemical profile should be done using the proper media and incubation conditions and confirmed by HPLC and HRMS methods. This is especially important when new records are being provided, or unexpected mycotoxin production by new fungal species. Then, the importance to deposit of "key" TFS in a non-profit Culture Collection by providing a pure monosporic culture. "Key" strain should be clearly identified on basis of ex-type strain, phylogenetic and biochemical uniqueness, genome sequence-data, strains associated to unique or extreme ambient. It is evident that a biological resources, on which public data has been generated, must be available to research community to check when erroneous results are discovered or when new advanced technologies are available for further study and characterization. In this respect, public service culture collections have been performing this function always by providing optimal environment for long-term maintenance and skilled personnel in identification and managing of fungal strains. Recently, great advance has been done in biodiversity by biochemical and molecular characterization of toxigenic fungi, though data streams from culture collections, research centers, and scientific community are not yet fully integrated with those from biochemical and molecular studies. We wish to stress the importance of using the right approaches in new advance studies on biochemical and molecular characterization of TFS to better understand and preserve the taxonomic diversity and guarantee metabolic properties of the toxigenic fungi community.