Phylogenetic Tree for the Gomphales

The order Gomphales contains the colourful coral fungi in the genus Ramaria, as well as some of our unusual and uncommon species like the toothed Beenakia dacostae and the 'gomphoid' species of Gloeocantharellus. The coral fungi were last revised in New Zealand by Ron Petersen in 1988 (The clavarioid fungi of New Zealand. DSIR Science Information Publishing). That was pre-molecular era work and species concepts have changed over time. Species with a broad distribution are now usually found to represent multiple phylogenetic species with narrower distributions, and sometimes cryptic morphological differenecs. That is true for the clavarioid fungi, where northern hemisphere names have been incorrectly applied in New Zealand, and where we have many undescribed species. The phylogenetic tree linked here was produced primarily with mult-gene data already available in GenBank. There are existing published trees in various papers on various groups in the order, but none of them seem to stitch together all the available data. The resulting super-matrix used to generate this tree is sometimes sparse and the alignment, especially for ITS, is saturated. Removal of poorly aligned regions essentially reduces the ITS alignment to the 5.8 region and few small islands of stability. Consequently, any phylogenies generated using just the saturated ITS region +LSU will be relatively poor without significant alignment pruning. The inclusion in any analysis of the ATP6 gene in addition to mtSSU should not deliver anything significantly different to each other because they are tightly coupled mitochondrial genes. The inclusion of Tef and RPB2 in analyses is critical, but the number of available sequences remains relatively low. The phylogeny suggests some interesting relationships and does support at least some recently recognised genera. However, the tree also contains many poorly supported branches and there is no doubt that more extensive sampling is needed to adequately resolve the genera in the order, and to sort out potential generic synonyms and older names that might be resurrected. The tree has been supplemented with data from sequences New Zealand species, highlighted in red. Further information on these species and collections may be found on the NZ Biota website (https://biotanz.landcareresearch.co.nz/).