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Morphological and molecular characterization of Humaria and Genea ectomycorrhizae from Hungarian deciduous forests

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Abstract

The ectomycorrhizae (EM) of Humaria and Genea, two closely related genera of the Pyronemataceae (Ascomycetes), were regularly found in different deciduous forests of Hungary. In the present paper, the morphology and anatomy of these EM are described in detail, including morphometric analyses. Identification of the EM was carried out by molecular taxonomic analyses of the nrDNA ITS sequences obtained from mycorrhizae, herbarium ascomata, and public databases. The anatomy of the EM, examined during this work, was almost identical. They possessed angular outer and epidermoid inner mantle layers and warted, thick-walled emanating hyphae. Ten of our EM sequences grouped into the clade of Humaria hemisphaerica sequences and one into the genus Genea. Both molecular taxonomic analysis and morphometry differentiated three sub-groups within the clade of Humaria, and these methods also clearly separated the EM of Genea from those of Humaria. We may suppose that the previous morphological–anatomical descriptions, lacking molecular taxonomic identification, do not concern the denominated taxa. As a consequence, we stress the importance of revaluating the literature data, based on morphotyping of Humaria and Genea EM, to prevent misidentification in future studies. The presented work demonstrates that combining molecular and morphological analysis is essential for the unambiguous identification of the EM formed by problematic taxa.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Hungarian Research Fund (OTKA), grant no. K 60887 and D 048333. G. M. Kovács is a grantee of the Bolyai János Scholarship. We thank Dr. Irén Siller, Bálint Dima, Zoltán Lukács, and the Natural History Museum, Budapest for providing herbarial ascocarp samples and Piroska Dózsainé Kerekes for laboratory assistance. We thank the reviewers for their important suggestions and valuable comments on the manuscript. The permissions for the research in the National Parks Hortobágy, Bükk, and Őrség are appreciated.

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  1. Department of Plant Anatomy, Institute of Biology, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Zsolt Erős-Honti, Gábor M. Kovács, Gyöngyi Szedlay & Erzsébet Jakucs

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  1. Zsolt Erős-Honti
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  2. Gábor M. Kovács
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  3. Gyöngyi Szedlay
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  4. Erzsébet Jakucs
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Correspondence to Zsolt Erős-Honti.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 4 The measured morpho-anatomical data of the EM samples examined
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Erős-Honti, Z., Kovács, G.M., Szedlay, G. et al. Morphological and molecular characterization of Humaria and Genea ectomycorrhizae from Hungarian deciduous forests. Mycorrhiza 18, 133–143 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00572-008-0164-7

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