Cryptic Diversity in Cladosporium cladosporioides Resulting from Species Delimitation Analysis

Concatenated loci alignment (.fasta), Maximum-Likelihood, Maximum-Parsimony and Bayesian reconstruction of Cladosporium cladosporioides phylogeny. 

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. Cladosporium cladosporioides is an extremely widespread fungus involved in associations ranging from mutualistic to pathogenic, and is the most represented Cladosporium species in genetic sequence databases, such as Genbank. Although the taxonomy of Cladosporium 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 C. cladosporioides, 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, translation elongation factor 1 and actin. The analyses involved 105 isolates revealing that currently available sequences of C. cladosporioides in GenBank actually represent more than one species. Moreover, we reported the erroneous taxonomical assignment of several isolates that should be ascribed to C. anthropophilum. 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.