Toward a Fully Resolved Fungal Tree of Life

In this review, we discuss the current status and future challenges for fully elucidating the fungal tree of life. In the last 15 years, advances in genomic technologies have revolutionized fungal systematics, ushering the field into the phylogenomic era. This has made the unthinkable possible, name...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Annual review of microbiology 2020-09, Vol.74 (1), p.291-313
Main Authors: James, Timothy Y, Stajich, Jason E, Hittinger, Chris Todd, Rokas, Antonis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
classification
Dark matter
Deep phylogeny
Fungi
phylogenomic inference
Reviews
Systematics
Taxa
Trees
uncultured majority
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Summary:In this review, we discuss the current status and future challenges for fully elucidating the fungal tree of life. In the last 15 years, advances in genomic technologies have revolutionized fungal systematics, ushering the field into the phylogenomic era. This has made the unthinkable possible, namely access to the entire genetic record of all known extant taxa. We first review the current status of the fungal tree and highlight areas where additional effort will be required. We then review the analytical challenges imposed by the volume of data and discuss methods to recover the most accurate species tree given the sea of gene trees. Highly resolved and deeply sampled trees are being leveraged in novel ways to study fungal radiations, species delimitation, and metabolic evolution. Finally, we discuss the critical issue of incorporating the unnamed and uncultured dark matter taxa that represent the vast majority of fungal diversity.
ISSN:0066-4227
1545-3251
DOI:10.1146/annurev-micro-022020-051835