Imaia, a new truffle genus to accommodate Terfezia gigantea

Abstract

Originally described from Japan by Sanshi Imai in 1933, the hypogeous ascomycete Terfezia gigantea was subsequently discovered in the Appalachian Mountains of the USA. Morphological, electron microscopic, and phylogenetic studies of specimens collected in both regions revealed that, despite this huge geographic disjunction, (1) the Japanese and Appalachian specimens are remarkably similar both in morphology and the sampled rDNA sequences, (2) the species unambiguously falls into the Morchellaceae and is separated from the genus Terfezia in the Pezizaceae, (3) its spores are much larger than those of Terfezia spp. and are enclosed in a unique, electron-semitransparent, amorphous epispore that appears to be permeated with minute, meandering strands or canals. In addition to the molecular phylogenetic results, the numerous nuclei in ascospores, the dome shaped, striate ascus septal plugs and the long cylindric Woronin bodies also strengthen the family assignment to the Morchellaceae. Moreover, the species occurs in moist, temperate forests as opposed to the xeric to arid habitats of other Terfezia spp. We propose the new, monotypic genus Imaia to accommodate the species.

• Asa-Gray disjunction
• Ascomycota
• edible fungus
• epispore
• hypogeous
• mycorrhizae
• Pezizomycetes
• phylogeny
• sequestrate
• ultrastructure

Kovács was a grantee of the János Bolyai Scholarship (Hungarian Academy of Sciences); his participation was supported by the Hungarian Research Fund (OTKA D048333, K72776) and by the Mycological Society of America (Martin-Baker Award). Trappe was supported in part by the U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, Corvallis, Oregon, and National Science Foundation Grant 0641297. Alsheikh’s research was funded by a scholarship from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. The authors are grateful to Dr. Yosuke Matsuda (Mie University, Japan) for his help in obtaining Japanese specimens and translating herbarium notes and Japanese locations, to Gregory Bonito (Duke University, USA) for extracting DNA from a fresh sample, to Dr. Pál Vági (Eötvös University, Hungary) for helping in fluorescence microscopy and to Dr. Matt E. Smith (Harvard University, USA) for sharing unpublished sequences for comparison. We also thank the curators and staffs of OSC, BPI, C, CBM, TMI, TSH, TNS for the loan of herbarium specimens.