A Phylogenetic re-evaluation of Dothideomycetes
Edited by Conrad L. Schoch, Joseph W. Spatafora, H. Thorsten Lumbsch, Sabine M. Huhndorf, Kevin D. Hyde, Johannes Z. Groenewald and Pedro W. Crous CBS-KNAW Fungal Biodiversity Centre, 2009: 220 pages ISBN: 978-90-70351-78-6
The class Dothidiomycetes comprises phylogenetically and ecologically diverse species that produce ascostroma and fissitunicate asci. It is the largest class in Ascomycota but its higher level phylogenetic relationships have never been well understood. The book includes 10 papers, the first of which presents a comprehensive class-wide phylogeny derived from five genes from 356 isolates and 41 families, and provides a useful backbone for understanding the relationships within the whole class. Six new families are established and this book is particularly useful because it has included all the currently accepted orders in the class. The successive papers present work on different orders or families, or specifically looking at members from special ecological habitats, such as freshwater, marine, rock-inhabiting and lichenized. The book also provides lots of high resolution colour plates of fungi that should arouse people's interest in this fascinating fungal group.
The book should be available in all universities, colleges and research institutes where research in any aspect of mycology is carried out or where mycology is taught.
Lei Cai
Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
HaiDian, Beijing 100190, China