Résumé
Fungi are central to all ecosystems and represent an incredibly valuable resource for humans. Despite this, current knowledge of fungal biodiversity and chemical diversity is sparse and generally focused on North America and Europe. Tropical regions, such as french guiana, are often understudied despite reports of great biodiversity in the neo-tropics and recent studies point to a large undiscovered fungal biodiversity. Thanks to the recent development of new and improved techniques the field of metabolomics can bring knowledge of both chemical diversity and biodiversity. Molecular networking and other bio-informatic tools allow for quick discovery of new compounds and this chemical information can be applied to biodiversity studies through chemotaxonomy, with the objectives of enhancing knowledge of fungal taxonomy and developing new techniques for the identification of fungal strains. Currently studies focusing on specialized and volatile metabolites are promising for the separation of closely related fungal species and recognition of species through profile comparison. However, MALDI-TOF-MS biotyping has given the best results for the identification of strains in both clinical and environmental studies. While these methods have rarely yet been applied to fungal fruiting bodies preliminary studies show encouraging results for the application of chemotaxonomy to fungi.