A new species of Lepiota with epithelial pileal covering

A new species, Lepiota keralensis, was collected from Kerala, India and was studied using morphological and molecular (ITS, LSU and rpb2 gene) characters. The species is characterized by medium-sized basidiomata with innate squarrose brown coloured squamules on a white background, hyaline, dextrinoid, non-metachromatic, smooth-walled basidiospores, absence of cheilocystidia and pleurocystidia, and globose to ellipsoid cells on pileal covering. Morphological as well as phylogenetic analyses confirm the placement of the new species in Lepiota sect. Echinatae. The discovery of the new species adds to the existing data on tropical lepiotas., DNA extraction, PCR amplification and sequencing
DNA extraction was done using the RED Extract-N-Amp kit by Sigma-Aldrich Company. ITS1F and ITS4R were the primers used for the amplification of the ITS gene region, LR5 and LROR were used for LSU gene amplification and bRPB26-F and bRPB2-7.1R primers were used for the rpb2 gene. (White et al.1990, Vilgalys and Hester 1990, Matheny 2005). A quality check for PCR products was carried out by gel electrophoresis (2% agarose gel) after PCR amplification. PCR amplicons were purified using QIAGEN QIAquick PCR Purification Kit. Purified samples were taken for sequencing. The sequencing reaction was set-up in Applied Biosystems™ MiniAmp™ Plus Thermal cycler using Big Dye™ Terminator V3.1 kit. Forward and reverse DNA sequencing reactions of PCR amplicons were carried out with respective primers (ITS1F, ITS4R, LROR, LR5, bRPB26-F and bRPB2-7.1R) using BDT v3.1 Cycle sequencing kit on ABI 3730xl Genetic Analyzer. Sequencing was done by Barcode Biosc..., , # A new species of Lepiota with epithelial pileal covering

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ffbg79d43](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ffbg79d43)

## Description of the data and file structure

It is the combined data set (ITS,LSU & rpb2 sequence) used for the phylogenetic analysis of new species of lepiota.

### Files and variables

#### File: its\_lsu\_rpb2\_-\_last\_150824\_1.fas

**Description:** The final data set used for analysis comprised of sequences with high sequence similarity index, and included 183 sequences from 111 taxa with representatives from each section in *Lepiota*, other closely allied genera like *Cystolepiota*, *Echinoderma*, *Leucoagaricus*, *Leucocoprinus*, *Macrolepiota*, *Pseudolepiota*. *Agaricus* was set as the outgroup.

## Code/software

The data sets were aligned with MAFFT web tool ([https://mafft.cbrc.jp/alignment/server](https://mafft.cbrc.jp/alignment/server)). The MAFFT aligned data sets were manually aligned using MEGA X64. Maximum Likelihood (ML...