Reviews, Perspectives, and Commentaries in Fungal Secondary Metabolites and Mycotoxins

Fungal secondary metabolites, including mycotoxins, are central to fungal biology and have wide-ranging impacts on ecological interactions and outcomes relevant to agriculture, food systems, biotechnology, and human and animal health. Recent advances in genome mining, comparative genomics, metabolomics, and analytical workflows have rapidly expanded our view of biosynthetic diversity and regulatory complexity across taxa and environments. At the same time, the field continues to face shared challenges, including linking genomic potential to expressed chemistry, strengthening confidence in metabolite identification and annotation, improving reproducibility across analytical pipelines, and translating mechanistic insight into effective detection and mitigation. This Research Topic aims to bring together viewpoints and reviews that synthesize and critically evaluate recent progress in fungal secondary metabolites and mycotoxins. We particularly welcome contributions that clarify current points of debate, identify limitations and knowledge gaps, and propose forward-looking conceptual or methodological frameworks. Articles offering best-practice recommendations, especially those for discovery, dereplication, annotation, validation, and reporting are strongly encouraged, as are perspectives that outline priorities for research translation in crop protection, food safety, biotechnology, and One Health contexts. The scope of this Research Topic spans fundamental and applied themes in fungal secondary metabolism and mycotoxin biology. We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following areas: Biosynthetic gene clusters, pathway organization, and pathway evolution. Regulation of secondary metabolism (e.g., chromatin-based control, transcriptional networks, environmental cues). Secondary Metabolite discovery and dereplication strategies. Functional characterization of pathways and enzymes linking genotype to chemistry and phenotype. Comparative genomics and systems biology approaches connecting biosynthetic potential to metabolite output. Ecological roles of secondary metabolites in competition, signalling, symbiosis, and pathogenesis. Mycotoxin biosynthesis, diversity, and emergence across taxa and environments. Exposure routes and contamination dynamics across food and feed chains. Strategies for detection, monitoring, mitigation, and control. Submissions should provide broad value to the community through clear critical interpretation and well-supported, forward-looking viewpoints, while maintaining a primary focus on fungal secondary metabolites and mycotoxins. Topic editors: Antonio Moretti, Alessandra Villani Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78103/reviews-perspectives-and-commentaries-in-fungal-secondary-metabolites-and-mycotoxins