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.
Highlights
Chaetothyriales is an ascomycetous order within Eurotiomycetes of the subphylum Pezizomycotina (Gueidan et al 2014; Wijayawardene et al 2020)
When separate trees of LSU and ITS were compared with the tree based on the concatenated alignment, bootstrap values in the combined tree on average were higher than those found in single-gene trees
With Bayesian analysis (BA) (Fig. 3) the combined tree contained a total of 153 supported clades, and with maximum likelihood (ML) 123 supported clades
Summary
Chaetothyriales is an ascomycetous order within Eurotiomycetes of the subphylum Pezizomycotina (Gueidan et al 2014; Wijayawardene et al 2020). The order is renowned for containing so-called black yeasts and their filamentous relatives, among which are numerous opportunistic. Well-known genera are Cladophialophora, Exophiala, Fonsecaea and Phialophora (Herpotrichiellaceae), but the order is much more diverse, in the literature of the last decades containing about 42 genera (with frequent additions) arranged in six families as summarized in the taxonomic browser of NCBI and 56 genera belonging to 11 families by Wijayawardene et al (2020). A family that has been linked to Chaetothyriales, viz. Coccodiniaceae, contains four genera with few epilithic and epiphytic species having nondescript morphology and which are difficult to cultivate and sequence. Other families included in the order by Barr (1987a, b), i.e
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