GNPS Chemodiversity in Aspergillus section Flavi

Aspergillus section Flavi includes some of the most famous mycotoxin producing filamentous fungi known to mankind. Most notably, food contaminating species such as A. flavus and A. parasiticus are capable of producing aflatoxins, while other non-toxinogenic species such as A. oryzae and A. sojae are substantially used in biotechnology for production fermented foods, enzymes and small organic compounds. In recent years a number of new species have been included in section Flavi, however these species have been much less studied from a chemical point of view. In this study, we explored one representative strain of a total of 28 fungal species in section Flavi by systematically evaluating the relationship between taxonomy and secondary metabolites with LC-MS/MS analysis for the first time and dereplication through an in-house database and the Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) platform, which is a powerful tool for large-scale chemotaxonomic analysis of closely related species in genus Aspergillus.