Abstract
Parmelioid lichens form a species-rich group of predominantly foliose and fruticose lichenized fungi encompassing a broad range of morphological and chemical diversity. Using a multilocus approach, we reconstructed a phylogeny including 323 OTUs of parmelioid lichens and employed ancestral character reconstruction methods to understand the phenotypical evolution within this speciose group of lichen-forming fungi. Specifically, we were interested in the evolution of growth form, epicortex structure, and cortical chemistry. Since previous studies have shown that results may differ depending on the reconstruction method used, here we employed both maximum-parsimony and maximum-likelihood approaches to reconstruct ancestral character states. We have also implemented binary and multistate coding of characters and performed parallel analyses with both coding types to assess for potential coding-based biases. We reconstructed the ancestral states for nine well-supported major clades in the parmelioid group, two higher-level sister groups and the ancestral character state for all parmelioid lichens. We found that different methods for coding phenotypical characters and different ancestral character state reconstruction methods mostly resulted in identical reconstructions but yield conflicting inferences of ancestral states, in some cases. However, we found support for the ancestor of parmelioid lichens having been a foliose lichen with a non-pored epicortex and pseudocyphellae. Our data suggest that some traits exhibit patterns of evolution consistent with adaptive radiation.
Highlights
Molecular data have revolutionized our understanding of evolution, especially in groups with relatively simple morphology and high levels of phenotypic homoplasy, such as fungi
The nine major clades and their phenotypical characters are discussed in detail in [31]
Ancestral character state reconstruction methods are widely used to understand evolutionary histories for a broad spectrum of organisms [13,14,25,49,50,51,52,53] and our analyses resulted in identical reconstructions, regardless of the type of charactercoding, with few exceptions
Summary
Molecular data have revolutionized our understanding of evolution, especially in groups with relatively simple morphology and high levels of phenotypic homoplasy, such as fungi. The enormous increase in knowledge has led to a revival of fungal systematics This is especially true in fungal groups, including lichen-forming fungi, for which vegetative characters have traditionally played an important role in classification and inferring relationships. Lichenized fungi usually form persistent thalli to house their photosynthetic partner and produce a wide array of secondary metabolites that play a variety of roles in the maintenance of the symbiotic association [1,2,3,4,5]. These phenotypical characters have been heavily utilized in traditional classifications of these organisms [6,7]. In addition to elucidating phylogenetic relationships among fungi, molecular phylogenies are increasingly popular in studying trait evolution, with numerous examples from lichenized fungi providing novel insight into the evolution of chemical and morphological diversity [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]
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