**1.1 Macrofungi**

Macrofungi or mushrooms are not taxonomic categories, being most frequently used as terms for fungi with distinctive fruiting bodies, which are usually fleshy and edible, hypogeous or epigeous, large enough to be seen with the naked eye, and picked by hand (Chang and Miles, 2002, Karaman et al., 2012).

Lignicolous (wood-decaying) macrofungi, mostly belonging to the *Polyporaceae* family, are easily noticed, collected and recognized in the field. Taxonomically, these fungi mainly belong to the phyla Basidiomycota and Ascomycota, including about 20,000 known species, widely distributed on Earth. Recent estimations suggest that even more than 1.5 million species of fungi exist on our planet and about 140,000 species belong to macrofungi. However, only 10% of them are explored and 16% are cultured (Chang & Miles, 2004; Mueller, Bills & Foster, 2004).
