A re-evaluation of the Chaetothyriales using criteria of comparative biology

Abstract

Chaetothyriales is an ascomycetous order within Eurotiomycetes. The order is particularly known through the black yeasts and filamentous relatives that cause opportunistic infections in humans. All species in the order are consistently melanized. Ecology and habitats of species are highly diverse, and often rather extreme in terms of exposition and toxicity. Families are defined on the basis of evolutionary history, which is reconstructed by time of divergence and concepts of comparative biology using stochastical character mapping and a multi-rate Brownian motion model to reconstruct ecological ancestral character states. Ancestry is hypothesized to be with a rock-inhabiting life style. Ecological disparity increased significantly in late Jurassic, probably due to expansion of cytochromes followed by colonization of vacant ecospaces. Dramatic diversification took place subsequently, but at a low level of innovation resulting in strong niche conservatism for extant taxa. Families are ecologically different in degrees of specialization. One of the clades has adapted ant domatia, which are rich in hydrocarbons. In derived families, similar processes have enabled survival in domesticated environments rich in creosote and toxic hydrocarbons, and this ability might also explain the pronounced infectious ability of vertebrate hosts observed in these families. Conventional systems of morphological classification poorly correspond with recent phylogenetic data. Species are hypothesized to have low competitive ability against neighboring microbes, which interferes with their laboratory isolation on routine media. The dataset is unbalanced in that a large part of the extant biodiversity has not been analyzed by molecular methods, novel taxonomic entities being introduced at a regular pace. Our study comprises all available species sequenced to date for LSU and ITS, and a nomenclatural overview is provided. A limited number of species could not be assigned to any extant family.

Sequence data from isolated lichen-associated melanized fungi enhance delimitation of two new lineages within Chaetothyriomycetidae

“…Molecular analyses: DNA extraction, amplification, sequencing, and identification Sequence data of the studied strains were already available in GenBank as they were published previously by Muggia et al (2016Muggia et al ( , 2017. Here, we used the data which were generated for the nucLSU fragment, while additional ITS sequences were recently generated and included in the analyses of Quan et al (2020). The nucLSU fragment was amplified and sequenced in two parts using primers SR6R (http://www.…”

“…Others remained unnamed and awaited formal description, anticipating additional knowledge of the extant diversity of these fungi. Relationships within the order Chaetothyriales have been elucidated by Teixeira et al (2017) and Quan et al (2020). The enlarged DNA sequence dataset of Chaetothyriomycetidae now available (e.g., Chomnunti et al 2012;Gueidan et al 2014;Vasse et al 2017) facilitates phylogenetic placements of the yet-unnamed lineages of lichen-inhabiting black fungi.…”

Core and indicative bacterial and fungal taxa define characteristic soil communities of arable land, grassland, and forest

“…Families that characterized fungal communities in permanent grasslands included for instance the grassland-specific Chaetothyriaceae (Figure 4d). Chaetothyriaceae include mainly epiphytic species living on plants (Quan et al . 2020) suggesting that their distribution may depend on host plants.…”

“…Families that characterized fungal communities in permanent grasslands included for instance the grassland-specific Chaetothyriaceae (Figure 4d). Chaetothyriaceae include mainly epiphytic species living on plants (Quan et al 2020) suggesting that their distribution may depend on host plants. However, in a survey of switchgrass-associated fungal communities, OTUs attributed to this family have also been detected associated to the switchgrass roots and adjacent soils, but not on plant leaves (Lee and Hawkes 2020), indicating that Chaetothyriaceae also include soil fungi.…”

Comparative genomics of opportunistic Phialophora species involved in divergent disease types

“…rDNA ITS sequences of 26 strains were compared with all currently sequenced members of Herpotrichiellaceae and Cyphellophoraceae 21 . A multilocus tree of the same strains using ITS and partial BTUB was made using primers and conditions specified by Li et al 8 Multiple sequence alignments were made by MAFFT v7 (http://mafft.cbrc.jp/) and optimised manually using MEGA v7.2 22 and BIOEDIT v7.2 23 .…”