Fungal Molecular Taxonomy: A laboratory manual

Fungal molecular taxonomy is a potential field of fungal biology to understand the biodiversity of fungi and their interaction with the ecosystem. Their correct identification and recognition at species and even genus level is very important for biologists and pathologists to make disease management strategies against them and utilization of them as a biocontrol agent and for the production of the bioactive compound for commercial application.

Conventional fungal taxonomy has become powerful and more authenticated by the aid of molecular biology and the integration of computational biology as well. No doubt, by the invention of molecular tools, new ways are open to exploring fungus community. However, challenges are still there.

This effort has been made by considering the prospective, which is based on the philosophy of Fungal Molecular Biology (FMB) Laboratory and Fungal molecular Biology culture collection (FMB-CC-UAF). This manual is written to give the basic practical insight to the students and researchers who are associated directly or indirectly to the field of fungal molecular taxonomy.

This manual has six chapters as experiments that are actually six fundamental and basic steps of fungal molecular taxonomy study. I hope this manual would serve as a milestone for unravelling the story fungal taxonomy.