Cryptic Diversity in Cladosporium cladosporioides Resulting from Species Delimitation Analysis

<strong>Concatenated loci alignment (.fasta), Maximum-Likelihood, Maximum-Parsimony and Bayesian reconstruction of <em>Cladosporium cladosporioides</em> phylogeny. </strong> Files represent dataset of the study: "Cryptic Diversity in Cladosporium cladosporioides Resulting from Species Delimitation Analysis" ABSTRACT Establishing a stable taxonomy is particularly important for understanding fungal biodiversity, as well as the evolution of particular traits related to symbiotic interactions. <em>Cladosporium cladosporioides </em>is an extremely widespread fungus involved in associations ranging from mutualistic to pathogenic, and is the most represented <em>Cladosporium</em> species in genetic sequence databases, such as Genbank. Although the taxonomy of <em>Cladosporium</em> species is subjected to frequent revisions, which nowadays mostly rely on molecular data, few studies explored cryptic diversity of this genus using the recently developed species delimitation methods. Considering a previous study which reported several hypothetical species within <em>C. cladosporioides</em>, here we try to fill the gap of knowledge about phylogenetic relationships for this species and tested four different methods of species delimitation using the combined DNA barcodes ITS, <em>translation elongation factor 1</em> and <em>actin</em>. The analyses involved 105 isolates revealing that currently available sequences of <em>C. cladosporioides</em> in GenBank actually represent more than one species. Moreover, we reported the erroneous taxonomical assignment of several isolates that should be ascribed to <em>C. anthropophilum</em>. Our results revealed a certain degree of discordance among species delimitation methods, which can be efficiently treated using conservative approaches, in order to minimize the risk of considering false positives.