Taxonomic delimitation of the genera Bryoria and Sulcaria, with a new combination Sulcaria spiralifera introduced

Abstract

Bryoria pseudocapillaris and B. spiralifera are currently treated as members of Bryoria section Implexae although conspicuous, long and depressed pseudocyphellae characterizing both species resemble those found in the genus Sulcaria. Both genera belong in Parmeliaceae and form an alectorioid group together with Alectoria, Gowardia and Pseudephebe. Parsimony and Bayesian analyses of ITS, partial GAPDH and partial Mcm7 sequence data were used to examine the phylogenetic position of B. pseudocapillaris and B. spiralifera, and in light of these results evaluate the generic delimitation of Bryoria and Sulcaria. A total of 110 specimens of 53 species containing representatives from alectorioid and closely related genera were included in the analyses. The results clearly show first, that both B. pseudocapillaris and B. spiralifera belong in Sulcaria rather than in Bryoria, and second, that they should be considered conspecific. Bryoria pseudocapillaris is proposed as a synonym under B. spiralifera and the name Sulcaria spiralifera comb. nov. is introduced.

Molecular insights into the lichen genusAlectoria(Parmeliaceae) in North America

“…The results of our molecular phylogenetic analyses, despite employing an expanded taxon sampling, largely do not support the current taxonomic delineations of species within Alectoria that have been based on morphological and chemical characters. This supports the findings of previous studies (Myllys et al 2014;Halonen et al 2009) that have recovered similar results using a more limited sampling both taxonomically and geographically. However, our molecular analysis sheds considerable new light on this distinctive group of macrolichens and suggests substantial avenues for further search.…”

“…We found a clade within Alectoria that contained several taxa previously considered to be linked by morphological or chemical intermediates (Brodo and Hawksworth 1977;Hawksworth 1972;Myllys et al 2014). This clade, the Alectoria sarmentosa group, includes a corticolous isidiate taxon (A. imshaugii, Fig.…”

“…To examine the relationships within Alectoria, individual datasets were constructed for each of the three genes with taxon sampling across the genus and with Gowardia nigricans used as an outgroup following Miadlikowska et al (2014), Myllys et al (2014), and Halonen et al (2009). The datasets were assembled in Mesquite 3.03 (Maddison and Maddison 2015) by downloading the following from GenBank to supplement the newly generated sequences: all ITS, Mcm7, and mtSSU sequences tagged with ''Alectoria'' and ''Gowardia nigricans'' returned from an NCBI Nucleotide search on 07 August 2015.…”

“…Parmeliaceae (Crespo et al 2010a,b;Buaruang et al 2015;de Paz et al 2010a,b;Del-Prado et al 2010Divakar et al 2010Divakar et al , 2013Elix et al 2010;Lendemer and Hodkinson 2010;Leavitt et al 2014;Lendemer and Ruiz 2015;Mark et al 2012;Nelson et al 2012;Nelsen et al 2013;Saag et al 2014), and more specifically the related fruticose genus Bryoria (Myllys et al 2014;Velmala et al 2014), Alectoria has not been the direct subject of such a study. Nonetheless, recent molecular studies of Bryoria and Parmeliaceae have included samples of Alectoria and recovered results that strongly suggested further study was needed (Myllys et al 2014;Halonen et al 2009).…”

Parallel Miocene‐dominated diversification of the lichen‐forming fungal genus Oropogon (Ascomycota: Parmeliaceae) in different continents

“…Each taxon from the reconstructed species tree was assigned with a geographic state of New World, Old World, or widespread. Species distributions were obtained from selected literature (Esslinger, 1980;Wu & Wang, 1992;Chen, 1996;Myllys & al., 2014). We subsequently used the likelihood ratio test and the Akaike information criterion (AIC) for model comparisons.…”