Morphological and Molecular Identification of Cytotoxic Fungus Species; Hebeloma crustuliniforme and Hebeloma sinapizans

Abstract

Taxonomic positions and phylogenetic relations of Hebeloma species have not yet been figured out molecularly in Turkey. Most species of the genus are mainly poisonous and a few of which are edible. Hebeloma crustuliniforme and H. sinapizans are two important species that contain deadly toxins so only morphological characters may not be enough for reliable identification. The DNA sequence of the nuclear ribosomal Internal Transcribed spacer (nrITS) region is used in addition to morphological characters in the present study. Phylogenetic analysis is conducted on the sequence dataset by using the Maximum Likelihood (ML) principle to see the taxonomic placement of two poisonous species. Studying morphological traits and molecular markers together is very useful to distinguish these two poisonous species from close relatives. The first sequence data of these species were added to the literature on behalf of our country with this study.