Abstract
So far approximately 144,000 species of fungi have been named but sequences of the majority of them do not exist in the public databases. Therefore, the quality and coverage of public barcode databases is a bottleneck that hinders the study of fungi. Cortinarius is the largest genus of Agaricales with thousands of species world-wide. The most diverse subgenus in Cortinarius is Telamonia and its species have been considered one of the most taxonomically challenging in the Agaricales. Its high diversity combined with convergent, similar appearing taxa have earned it a reputation of being an impossible group to study. In this study a total of 746 specimens, including 482 type specimens representing 184 species were sequenced. Also, a significant number of old types were successfully sequenced, 105 type specimens were over 50 years old and 18 type specimens over 100 years old. Altogether, 20 epi- or neotypes are proposed for recently commonly used older names. Our study doubles the number of reliable DNA-barcodes of species of C. subgenus Telamonia in the public sequence databases. This is also the first extensive phylogenetic study of the subgenus. A majority of the sections and species are shown in a phylogenetic context for the first time. Our study shows that nomenclatural problems, even in difficult groups like C. subgenus Telamonia, can be solved and consequently identification of species based on ITS barcodes becomes an easy task even for non-experts of the genus.
Highlights
Approximately 144,000 species of fungi have been named (Willis 2018) but sequences of the majority of them do not exist in the GenBank or UNITE
There are two ways for naming a barcode in a sequence database: either sequence a named voucher specimen based on a morphological identification or sequence a type specimen
The first approach is currently the most widely used the core reason for using the DNAbased identification is the unreliability of the morphological identification
Summary
Approximately 144,000 species of fungi have been named (Willis 2018) but sequences of the majority of them do not exist in the GenBank or UNITE. Species identification of fungi in academic studies is almost solely based on nrDNA ITS barcodes (Lindahl et al 2013) Those collections with taxonomically correct names that are not in any public sequence repositories are basically omitted in academic research. Two excellent platforms for delivering sequencebased identification information for the end-users include RefSeq under GenBank (Schoch et al 2014) and UNITE (Kõljalg et al 2013). In both cases an extra step by an expert, in addition to the normal sequence submission, is required, but often is left undone, making part of the already existing information unusable
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