Abstract
Culture techniques are vital in both traditional and modern fungal taxonomy. Establishing sexual–asexual links and synanamorphs, extracting DNA and secondary metabolites are mainly based on cultures. However, it is widely accepted that a large number of species are not sporulating in nature while others cannot be cultured. Recent ecological studies based on culture-independent methods revealed these unculturable taxa, i.e., dark taxa. Recent fungal diversity estimation studies suggested that environmental sequencing plays a vital role in discovering missing species. However, Sanger sequencing is still the main approach in determining DNA sequences in culturable species. In this paper, we summarize culture-based and culture-independent methods in the study of ascomycetous taxa. High-throughput sequencing of leaf endophytes, leaf litter fungi and fungi in aquatic environments is important to determine dark taxa. Nevertheless, currently, naming dark taxa is not recognized by the ICN, thus provisional naming of them is essential as suggested by several studies.
Highlights
Fungi form diverse communities in nature and play essential roles in many ecosystems
Several studies have shown that it is important to observe the ‘anomalies’ of a particular taxon in a synthetic medium [9,24]. This is because different morphological structures are sometimes produced on media in culture that may be different from their appearance on the natural host [9]
Leinonen et al [192] proposed a public repository, Sequence Read Archive (SRA) to store HTS data from eDNA. This database was established as a separate section of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collab-oration (INSDC) [192,193]
Summary
Fungi form diverse communities in nature and play essential roles in many ecosystems. Studies of fungal diversity have incorporated more and more DNA-based molecular techniques and polyphasic approaches in the past three decades (1990–2020), resulting in considerable advances in the field. In these methods, species identification, linking sexual–asexual morphs (of pleomorphic taxa), and higher-level classification are performed based on DNA sequences. Species identification, linking sexual–asexual morphs (of pleomorphic taxa), and higher-level classification are performed based on DNA sequences These unculturable taxa are important in studying missing taxa in the Kingdom Fungi [5]. We discuss the different aspects of cultures in the taxonomy of taxa in Ascomycota
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