A robust phylogenetic framework for ophiostomatoid fungi: orders Ophiostomatales and Microascales (Sordariomycetes, Ascomycota)
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Llewellyn, Theo
Vogler, Alfried
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Ophiostomatoids are an ecological group of microfungi that commonly associate with bark and ambrosia beetles. In addition to being insect symbionts, they play significant ecological roles as plant pathogens and include species responsible for major forest
tree diseases. Despite their ecological similarities, ophiostomatoid fungi are distributed across two distantly related orders, Microascales and Ophiostomatales, which include many additional fungi with diverse ecological lifestyles. Previous studies have typically
focused on localised taxonomic issues or specific fungal ecologies. As a result, public repositories suffer from fragmented locus coverage, sequence misidentifications, and uneven taxon sampling, leaving the community without a standardised, comprehensive dataset to study these fungi at scale. To address this, all available ophiostomatoid fungal sequence data across seven widely used marker loci were curated and analysed to reconstruct densely sampled alignments and trees covering 918 concatenated Microascales sequences and 859 Ophiostomatales sequences. Evaluation of locus performance showed that whilst individual loci exhibit extreme state frequency heterogeneity, composition bias, and topological discordance, concatenated datasets produce robust, well-supported topologies consistent with published genomic studies. Integrating phylogenies with broad ecological trait data reveals a clear contrast in data distribution between the two orders, with ecological lifestyles and beetle associations being broadly uniform and stable across the Ophiostomatales tree but highly heterogeneous in the Microascales, despite comparable species richness. These macroecological data distributions are also shaped by taxonomic philosophies, whereby the fragmentation of Microascales into small, restricted genera tends to visually amplify trait variation, whereas the large, heterogeneous genera of Ophiostomatales can obscure it. This unified, fully reproducible framework establishes the stable topology and alignments necessary for future molecular taxonomy and trait evolution analyses, while providing a high-quality reference for environmental sequence identification, which in turn can support future biodiversity and biosecurity research.
tree diseases. Despite their ecological similarities, ophiostomatoid fungi are distributed across two distantly related orders, Microascales and Ophiostomatales, which include many additional fungi with diverse ecological lifestyles. Previous studies have typically
focused on localised taxonomic issues or specific fungal ecologies. As a result, public repositories suffer from fragmented locus coverage, sequence misidentifications, and uneven taxon sampling, leaving the community without a standardised, comprehensive dataset to study these fungi at scale. To address this, all available ophiostomatoid fungal sequence data across seven widely used marker loci were curated and analysed to reconstruct densely sampled alignments and trees covering 918 concatenated Microascales sequences and 859 Ophiostomatales sequences. Evaluation of locus performance showed that whilst individual loci exhibit extreme state frequency heterogeneity, composition bias, and topological discordance, concatenated datasets produce robust, well-supported topologies consistent with published genomic studies. Integrating phylogenies with broad ecological trait data reveals a clear contrast in data distribution between the two orders, with ecological lifestyles and beetle associations being broadly uniform and stable across the Ophiostomatales tree but highly heterogeneous in the Microascales, despite comparable species richness. These macroecological data distributions are also shaped by taxonomic philosophies, whereby the fragmentation of Microascales into small, restricted genera tends to visually amplify trait variation, whereas the large, heterogeneous genera of Ophiostomatales can obscure it. This unified, fully reproducible framework establishes the stable topology and alignments necessary for future molecular taxonomy and trait evolution analyses, while providing a high-quality reference for environmental sequence identification, which in turn can support future biodiversity and biosecurity research.
Date Issued
2026-09-11
Date Acceptance
2026-08-28
Citation
MycoKeys, 2026, 140, pp.103-129
ISSN
1314-4057
Publisher
Pensoft Publishers
Start Page
103
End Page
129
Journal / Book Title
MycoKeys
Volume
140
Copyright Statement
© Theo Llewellyn & Alfried P. Vogler. This is an open access article distributed under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (Attribution 4.0 International – CC BY 4.0).
License URL
Identifier
10.3897/mycokeys.140.201772
Subjects
Fungal lifestyle
insect symbiont
metabarcoding
molecular markers
plant pathogen
systematics
Publication Status
Published