Contribution of RPB2 to multilocus phylogenetic studies of the euascomycetes (Pezizomycotina, Fungi) with special emphasis on the lichen-forming Acarosporaceae and evolution of polyspory

Despite the recent progress in molecular phylogenetics, many of the deepest relationships among the main lineages of the largest fungal phylum, Ascomycota, remain unresolved. To increase both resolution and support on a large-scale phylogeny of lichenized and non-lichenized ascomycetes, we combined the protein coding-gene RPB2 with the traditionally used nuclear ribosomal genes SSU and LSU. Our analyses resulted in the naming of the new subclasses Acarosporomycetidae and Ostropomycetidae, and the new class Lichinomycetes, as well as the establishment of the phylogenetic placement and novel circumscription of the lichen-forming fungi family Acarosporaceae. The delimitation of this family has been problematic over the past century, because its main diagnostic feature, true polyspory (numerous spores issued from multiple post-meiosis mitoses) with over 100 spores per ascus, is probably not restricted to the Acarosporaceae. This observation was confirmed by our reconstruction of the origin and evolution of this form of true polyspory using maximum likelihood as the optimality criterion. The various phylogenetic analyses carried out on our data sets allowed us to conclude that: (1) the inclusion of phylogenetic signal from ambiguously aligned regions into the maximum parsimony analyses proved advantageous in reconstructing phylogeny; however, when more data become available, Bayesian analysis using different models of evolution is likely to be more efficient; (2) neighbor-joining bootstrap proportions seem to be more appropriate in detecting topological conflict between data partitions of large-scale phylogenies than posterior probabilities; and (3) Bayesian bootstrap proportion provides a compromise between posterior probability outcomes (i.e., higher accuracy, but with a higher number of significantly supported wrong internodes) vs. maximum likelihood bootstrap proportion outcomes (i.e., lower accuracy, with a lower number of significantly supported wrong internodes).