Geographical diversity of Armillaria mellea s. s. based on phylogenetic analysis

• DOI: 10.1080/00275514.2000.12061134
• Publication Date: 2019-06-04T16:42:02Z
• Authors: M. P. A. Coetzee; B. D. Wingfield; T. C. Harrington; D. Dalevi; T. A. Coutinho; M. J. Wingfield
• Keywords: 580; 0301 basic medicine; Evolution; IGS; 1314 Physiology; 1105 Ecology; 1307 Cell Biology; 03 medical and health sciences; Rflps; Ribosomal RNA; Behavior and Systematics; 1311 Genetics; 1312 Molecular Biology; ITS; Phylogeny

Armillaria mellea was once thought to be a morphologically variable species with a wide distri- bution and a very broad host range. The relatively recent development of an indirect assessment of sex- ual incompatibility in Armillaria has led to identifi- cation of biological species within A. mellea s. 1. Par- tial intergenic spacer region (IGS) sequences of the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) operon have been deter- mined for most of the Northern Hemisphere species of Armillaria, but not for A. mellea s. s. The aim of this study was to determine the phylogenetic rela- tionships among isolates of A. mellea s. s. based on DNA sequences from the IGS as well as the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions. The IGS and the ITS sequence data indicate that A. mellea is highly variable but phylogenetically distant from the other species of Armillaria, and there are four separate groups of A. mellea distinguished by their geograph- ical origin: Asia, western North America, eastern North America and Europe. The data suggest that A. mellea populations from different regions are genet- ically isolated and may be in the process of specia- tion.