Cryolevonia (Cry.o.le.vo’ni.a. Gr. neut. n. kryos icy cold, frost, refers to the cryophilic nature of this yeast; N.L. fem n. levonia refers to levon / levonis, a designation for ‘yeast’ in the Romanic/Italic dialect of the inhabitants in mountain region where the yeast was originally found; N.L. fem. n. Cryolevonia).
Index Fungorum number: MB831388; Facesoffungi number: FoF
Type species: Cryolevonia schafbergensis.
The genus is circumscribed by the phylogenetic analyses shown in Figs 1, S1 and S2, having therefore as closest relatives the genera Camptobasidium and Glaciozyma of the family Camptobasidiaceae. Sexual reproduction is not known. Cells divide by budding. Hyphae and pseudohyphae can be formed and globose, teliospore-like structures can be observed on aged cultures. Basidia have not been observed. Ballistoconidia are not formed. The genus is ecologically adapted to cold habi- tats and is psychrophilic with maximum growth temperatures below 20 °C.
Fig. 1. Phylogenetic placement of Cryolevonia schafbergensis gen. nov and sp. nov. among the members of the families Camptobasidiaceae and Kriegeriaceae. The phylogenetic tree was based on a concatenated alignment of the D1/D2 domain of 26S rDNA and complete ITS region and used the maximum-likelihood method and the Tamura 92 model of sequence evolution. The tree was rooted with Cystobasidium minutum and environmental sequences for which cultures are not available are labelled as UFC (uncultured fungal clone). The numbers provided on branches are frequencies with which a given branch appeared in 1000 bootstrap replications (values below 70% not shown). The scale bar indicates the expected number of substitutions per site.
Species