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Citation for Study 15730

About Citation title: "Solving the ecology puzzle of saddle fungi (Helvella, Ascomycetes) using data from annotated collections and environmental samples".
About Study name: "Solving the ecology puzzle of saddle fungi (Helvella, Ascomycetes) using data from annotated collections and environmental samples".
About This study is part of submission 15730 (Status: Published).

Citation

Hwang J., Zhao Q., Yang Z., Wang Z., & Townsend J. 2014. Solving the ecology puzzle of saddle fungi (Helvella, Ascomycetes) using data from annotated collections and environmental samples. Fungal Diversity, .

Authors

  • Hwang J.
  • Zhao Q.
  • Yang Z.
  • Wang Z.
  • Townsend J.

Abstract

Abstract: Species of the Saddle fungi Helvella (Helvellaceae, Pezizomycotina) are morphologically well defined and have been intensively studied to reveal their taxonomy and derive a classification. While some other Helvella are ectomycorrhizal fungi, ecological roles of Helvella species as saprotrophs or mycorrhiza have been controversial. We applied SAT? to build an inclusive ITS alignment for annotated Helvella species and their related environmental ITS sequences and analyzed phylogenetic informativeness of ITS1, ITS2, and 5.8S regions using PhyDesgin. We demonstrated that phylogenetic informativeness of ITS1 was higher than that of ITS2 for recent divergences, but dropped more abruptly for deeper relationships. Consistent with previous studies, the analysis suggested high homoplasy for key morphologies in Helvella. Thus, morphology-based groupings of the genus are unlikely to reflect the true evolutionary history. Inclusion of environmental samples into the ITS phylogeny provided strong evidence that ectomycorrhizal association has appeared in several clades within Helvella, and diversified to adapt to different hosts and geographic conditions. However, similar conclusions could not be drawn regarding saprotrophic life styles in other Helvella species, and few environmental sequences from root samples was found in three clades that host herbaria collections of diverse Helvella species. No Helvella ITS sequences have been recovered from studies examining diverse soil samples. Illuminating the evolution of saprotrophic life style within Helvella requires expanded metagenomic investigation of plant and soil samples.

Keywords

ITS; phyloinformativeness; environmental sample; saddle fungi

External links

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  • Canonical resource URI: http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S15730
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