Phylogenetic placement of Micropeltidaceae

Abstract

Abstract"Microthyriaceae-like" taxa are fungal epiphytes which appear as black dots on the host surface. The families Micropeltidaceae and Microthyriaceae have been poorly studied, particularly with molecular data, due to the difficulty in obtaining pure cultures. The two families were placed in Microthyriales in many studies based on thyriothecial characters. Two species of Micropeltidaceae (Micropeltis dendrophthoes and M. zingiberacicola ) clustered at the base of Dothideomycetes and were unrelated to Microthyriaceae in previous phylogenetic trees. Their placements were treated as unresolved. We restudied sequence data of Micropeltidaceae and its related strains to clarify the current placement using authentic strains available in GenBank. Phylogenetic analyses generated from maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses (used ITS, LSU, RPB2, SSU and TEF1 sequence data) including Blast results, indicate that the current placement of Micropeltidaceae is in Ostropales (Lecanoromycetes), although it is not strongly supported. A revised phylogenetic tree for Micropeltidaceae and selected families from Dothideomycetes, Eurotiomycetes, Lecanoromycetes, Leotiomycetes and Sordariomycetes is provided with discussions in this paper.

Refined families of Dothideomycetes: orders and families incertae sedis in Dothideomycetes

“…However, members of Microthyriaceae have brown to black thyriothecia, comprising cuboid or angular cells arranged in parallel rows, with prominent central ostioles, and usually uniseptate ascospores (Doidge 1942;Müller and von Arx 1962;Luttrell 1973;Barr 1987b;Hofmann and Piepenbring 2006;Wu et al 2011b;Hyde et al 2013;Hongsanan et al 2015b;Hongsanan and Hyde 2017), while Micropeltidaceae has black-blue or greenish thyriothecia, comprising interwoven hyphae, with a central ostiole, and multiple trans-septate ascospores (Clements and Shear 1931;Batista 1959;von Arx and Müller 1975;Barr 1987b;Wu et al 2011b;Hyde et al 2013;Hongsanan and Hyde 2017;Hongsanan et al 2015a;Zeng et al 2019). Hongsanan and Hyde (2017) excluded Micropeltidaceae from Microthyriales based on their phylogenetic analyses. This was supported by new collections of Micropeltidaceae in Zeng et al (2019).…”

Novelties in Microthyriaceae (Microthyriales): Two New Asexual Genera with Three New Species from Freshwater Habitats in Guizhou Province, China

“…Microthyriaceae was introduced by Saccardo [ 1 ] with the sexual genus Microthyrium as the type genus. Microthyriaceae, poorly studied with few DNA sequence data, is the only family in Microthyriales [ 2 , 3 ]. Genera in the family were reappraised several times by Wu et al [ 4 , 5 , 6 ].…”

Diverse epiphyllous fungi on Cunninghamia leaves from the Oligocene of South China and their paleoecological and paleoclimatic implications

“…The phylum Ascomycota is the largest and most diverse group of extant fungi with 6600 genera (Wijayawardene et al, 2018). Its two families, Microthyriaceae and Micropeltidaceae, have the same type of fruiting bodies (thyriothecia) but differ in many morphological characters (Wu et al, 2011;Hyde et al, 2013;Hongsanan et al, 2015;Hongsanan & Hyde, 2017). Microthyriaceous fungi are characterized by ostiolate or non-ostiolate thyriothecia, which are usually globose or disk-shaped bodies.…”