Microascales Luttr. ex Benny & R.K. Benj., Mycotaxon 12(1): 40 (1980)

MycoBank number: MB 90484; Index Fungorum number: IF 90484; Facesoffungi number: FoF 09681;

Microascales comprises Ceratocystidaceae, Chadefaudiellaceae, Gondwanamycetaceae, Halosphaeriaceae, Microascaceae and Graphiaceae (Réblová et al. 2011, Maharachchikumbura et al. 2016b). In an outline of Ascomycota by Wijayawardene et al. (2018a), 99 genera have been accepted under Microascales, distributed in six families, but only 89 have molecular data (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/). A new genus Bretziella was introduced in Ceratocystidaceae by de Beer et al. (2017) to accommodate B. fagacearum. Microascales may be paraphyletic, due to the inclusion of Halosphaeriales (Zhang et al. 2006, Hibbett et al. 2007). However, in this study, Microascales formed a monophyletic clade and this agrees with Maharachchikumbura et al. (2015, 2016b) and Hongsanan et al. (2017). The divergence time for Microascales is estimated as 216 MYA (Fig. 2). Currently there are seven families and 110 genera in this order (this paper).

Figure 2 – The maximum clade credibility (MCC) tree, using the same dataset from Fig. 1. This analysis was performed in BEAST v1.10.2. The crown age of Sordariomycetes was set with Normal distribution, mean = 250, SD = 30, with 97.5% of CI = 308.8 MYA, and crown age of Dothideomycetes with Normal distribution mean = 360, SD = 20, with 97.5% of CI = 399 MYA. The substitution models were selected based on jModeltest2.1.1; GTR+I+G for LSU, rpb2 and SSU, and TrN+I+G for tef1 (the model TrN is not available in BEAUti 1.10.2, thus we used TN93). Lognormal distribution of rates was used during the analyses with uncorrelated relaxed clock model. The Yule process tree prior was used to model the speciation of nodes in the topology with a randomly generated starting tree. The analyses were performed for 100 million generations, with sampling parameters every 10000 generations. The effective sample sizes were checked in Tracer v.1.6 and the acceptable values are higher than 200. The first 20% representing the burn-in phase were discarded and the remaining trees were combined in LogCombiner 1.10.2., summarized data and estimated in TreeAnnotator 1.10.2. Bars correspond to the 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals. The scale axis shows divergence times as millions of years ago (MYA).

Figure 2 – Continued.

Figure 2 – Continued.