Top 50 most wanted fungi

By

Nilsson, R. Henrik
Wurzbacher, Christian
Bahram, Mohammad
Coimbra, Victor R. M
Larsson, Ellen
Tedersoo, Leho
Eriksson, Jonna
Duarte, Camila
Svantesson, Sten
Sánchez-García, Marisol
Ryberg, Martin K.
Kristiansson, Erik
Abarenkov, Kessy

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2016

Original Publication

MycoKeys

Volume

12

Pages

29-40

Subjects

environmental sequencing , Fungi , metabarcoding , taxonomic orphans , taxonomy feedback loop

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers 2011-

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/mycokeys.12.7553

 

Abstract

Environmental sequencing regularly recovers fungi that cannot be classified to any meaningful taxonomic level beyond “Fungi”. There are several examples where evidence of such lineages has been sitting in public sequence databases for up to ten years before receiving scientific attention and formal recognition. In order to highlight these unidentified lineages for taxonomic scrutiny, a search function is presented that produces updated lists of approximately genus-level clusters of fungal ITS sequences that remain unidentified at the phylum, class, and order levels, respectively. The search function (https://unite.ut.ee/top50.php) is implemented in the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi, such that the underlying sequences and fungal lineages are open to third-party annotation. We invite researchers to examine these enigmatic fungal lineages in the hope that their taxonomic resolution will not have to wait another ten years or more.