Abstract
Endocarpon species are key components of biological soil crusts. Phenotypic and systematic molecular analyses were carried out to identify samples of Endocarpon collected from the southeast edge of the Tengger Desert in China. These morphological and molecular analyses revealed two previously undescribed species that form highly supported independent monophyletic clades within Endocarpon. The new taxa were named Endocarpon deserticola sp. nov. and E. unifoliatum sp. nov. Furthermore, our results indicated that the newly developed protein coding markers adenylate kinase (ADK) and ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme h (UCEH) are useful for assessing species boundaries in phylogenic analyses.
Highlights
The lichen-forming fungal genus Endocarpon Hedw. is a key component of BSCs in the arid and semiarid regions, which can aggregate soil particles using squamulose thallus or rhizines at their lower surface[1]
In order to seek for new species resource with sand-stabilisation potential besides Endocarpon pusillum, we carried out taxonomic study on Chinese Endocarpon and two specific species drew our attention because they were not assignable to any known species based on phenotypic characteristics
We newly designed the primers for adenylate kinase (ADK) and ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme h (UCEH) based on the cDNA library of E. pusillum[50] in this study
Summary
The lichen-forming fungal genus Endocarpon Hedw. is a key component of BSCs in the arid and semiarid regions, which can aggregate soil particles using squamulose thallus or rhizines at their lower surface[1]. All the above results supported that Endocarpon pusillum has good drought resistant ability, which could be one potential species used in the prospective ‘desert biocarpet engieering’ (DBCE)[15], which has been proposed by Wei[16], referring to developing during a short period into a dominant protection system instead of the naked desert with the help of the artificial inoculation of the microorganisms. Two protein-coding genes (ADK and UCEH) were developed and used for the first time for phylogenetic analyses. Our major goals are (1) to describe the phenotypic characteristics of these two species, (2) understand the phylogenetic relationships in the genus Endocarpon and (3) as well as develop two new protein coding markers (ADK, UCEH) to strengthen the phylogenetic information
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