PLoS ONE (Jan 2015)

Coalescent-based species delimitation approach uncovers high cryptic diversity in the cosmopolitan lichen-forming fungal genus Protoparmelia (Lecanorales, Ascomycota).

  • Garima Singh,
  • Francesco Dal Grande,
  • Pradeep K Divakar,
  • Jürgen Otte,
  • Steven D Leavitt,
  • Katarzyna Szczepanska,
  • Ana Crespo,
  • Víctor J Rico,
  • André Aptroot,
  • Marcela Eugenia da Silva Cáceres,
  • H Thorsten Lumbsch,
  • Imke Schmitt

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124625
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 5
p. e0124625

Abstract

Read online

Species recognition in lichen-forming fungi has been a challenge because of unsettled species concepts, few taxonomically relevant traits, and limitations of traditionally used morphological and chemical characters for identifying closely related species. Here we analyze species diversity in the cosmopolitan genus Protoparmelia s.l. The ~25 described species in this group occur across diverse habitats from the boreal-arctic/alpine to the tropics, but their relationship to each other remains unexplored. In this study, we inferred the phylogeny of 18 species currently assigned to this genus based on 160 specimens and six markers: mtSSU, nuLSU, ITS, RPB1, MCM7, and TSR1. We assessed the circumscription of species-level lineages in Protoparmelia s. str. using two coalescent-based species delimitation methods--BP&P and spedeSTEM. Our results suggest the presence of a tropical and an extra-tropical lineage, and eleven previously unrecognized distinct species-level lineages in Protoparmelia s. str. Several cryptic lineages were discovered as compared to phenotype-based species delimitation. Many of the putative species are supported by geographic evidence.