IMA Fungus 6(1): 13-24, doi: 10.5598/imafungus.2015.06.01.02
Phylogenetic and microscopicstudies in the genus Lactifluus(Basidiomycota, Russulales) in West Africa, including the description of four new species
expand article infoDao Lamèga Maba‡, Atsu K. Guelly‡, Nourou S. Yorou§, Annemieke Verbeken|, Reinhard Agerer§
‡ Université de Lomé, Département de Botanique et Écologie Végétale, Faculté des Sciences, Lomé, Togo§ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Department Biology I, Organismic Biology: Mycology, München, Germany| Ghent University, Department of Biology, Research group Mycology, Ghent, Belgium
© Dao Maba, Atsu Guelly, Nourou Yorou, Annemieke Verbeken, Reinhard Agerer.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits to copy and distribute the article for non-commercial purposes, provided that the article is not altered or modified and the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Maba D, Guelly AK, Yorou NS, Verbeken A, Agerer R (2015) Phylogenetic and microscopicstudies in the genus Lactifluus(Basidiomycota, Russulales) in West Africa, including the description of four new species. IMA Fungus 6(1): 13-24. https://doi.org/10.5598/imafungus.2015.06.01.02
Open Access
Abstract
Despite the crucial ecological role of lactarioid taxa (Lactifluus, Lactarius) as common ectomycorrhiza formers in tropical African seasonal forests, their current diversity is not yet adequately assessed. During the last few years, numerous lactarioid specimens have been sampled in various ecosystems from Togo (West Africa). We generated 48 ITS sequences and aligned them against lactarioid taxa from other tropical African ecozones (Guineo-Congolean evergreen forests, Zambezian miombo). A Maximum Likelihood phylogenetic tree was inferred from a dataset of 109 sequences. The phylogenetic placement of the specimens, combined with morpho-anatomical data, supported the description of four new species from Togo within the monophyletic genus Lactifluus: within subgen. Lactifluus (L. flavellus), subgen. Russulopsis (L. longibasidius and L. pectinatus), and subgen. Edules (L. melleus). This demonstrates that the current species richness of the genus is considerably higher than hitherto estimated for African species and, in addition, a need to redefine the subgenera and sections within it.
Keywords
Cryptic species, Distribution, Lactifluus, Lactarius, Molecular phylogeny, Taxonomy