Top 50 most wanted fungi

Abstract

Environmental sequencing regularly recovers fungi that cannot be classified to any meaningful taxonomic level beyond "Fungi". There are several examples where evidence of such lineages has been sitting in public sequence databases for up to ten years before receiving scientific attention and formal recognition. In order to highlight these unidentified lineages for taxonomic scrutiny, a search function is presented that produces updated lists of approximately genus-level clusters of fungal ITS sequences that remain unidentified at the phylum, class, and order levels, respectively. The search function (https://unite.ut.ee/top50.php) is implemented in the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi, such that the underlying sequences and fungal lineages are open to third-party annotation. We invite researchers to examine these enigmatic fungal lineages in the hope that their taxonomic resolution will not have to wait another ten years or more. Key words

Morphologic and molecular data help adopting the insect-pathogenic nephridiophagids (Nephridiophagidae) among the early diverging fungal lineages, close to the Chytridiomycota

“…High-throughput sequencing is rapidly gaining in popularity as a means of studying fungus-insect interactions, and published studies have uncovered surprising diversity even within single insect individuals (e.g., Dhami et al 2013). This is in line with the results from other environmental fungal sequencing efforts, where tens to hundreds of previously unknown (or at least not sequenced) species are usually found in each new study undertaken (Nilsson et al 2016). It is thus not speculative to assume that a significant number of insect pathogenic fungi await discovery and formal description.…”

Bifiguratus adelaidae, gen. et sp. nov., a new member of Mucoromycotina in endophytic and soil-dwelling habitats

“…This dimorphic species is affiliated with epihyphal bacteria and appears to have a wide host range spanning multiple lineages of plants, as well as subsurface soils in diverse forests. This fungus is part of UNITE's "most wanted" fungi as cluster code UCL7_006587, ranked number 1 at the phylum level based on number of studies and number 4 based on number of sequences (Nilsson et al 2016). Description of this species exemplifies the potential to use environmental sequencing to guide taxonomic discovery.…”

“…Indeed, new sequencing techniques frequently reveal large numbers of uncharacterized taxa that have not been described because of the lack of representative reference specimens in herbaria and/or culture collections . A major gap in our understanding of fungal diversity lies in determining the connections between fungi detected through next-generation sequencing or other culture-free methods and fungi already known to mycologists (Nilsson et al 2016;Hesse et al 2016). One approach is to use next-generation data sets to guide subsequent efforts to isolate target fungi from the same environments, thus providing biological material for further functional and molecular analyses (Hesse et al 2016).…”

Unexpected high species diversity among European stalked puffballs – a contribution to the phylogeny and taxonomy of the genus Tulostoma (Agaricales)

“…None of the newly generated ITS sequences were significantly similar to the "most wanted fungi" ITS dataset of Nilsson et al (2016) as explored through BLAST.…”