Cladosterigma
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| Cladosterigma | |
|---|---|
Scientific classification  | |
| Kingdom: | Fungi |
| Division: | Ascomycota |
| Class: | Lecanoromycetes |
| Order: | Graphidales |
| Family: | Gomphillaceae |
| Genus: | Cladosterigma Pat. (1892) |
| Species: | C. clavariella |
| Binomial name | |
| Cladosterigma clavariella | |
| Synonyms[1] | |
| |
Cladosterigma is a fungal genus in the family Gomphillaceae. It is monospecific, comprising the single species Cladosterigma clavariella. The fungus is a hyperparasite: it grows on living leaves of myrtle relatives (genus Eugenia) where it parasitises a plant-pathogenic fungus in the genus Phyllachora. It is known only from an asexual state that forms conspicuous, yellow, branched synnemata (bundles of spore-bearing filaments) erupting through the leaf surface.
The genus Cladosterigma was established by Narcisse Théophile Patouillard in 1892 with C. fusisporum from Ecuador;[2] Carlo Luigi Spegazzini had earlier described Microcera clavariella from Paraguay on Eugenia leaves associated with Phyllachora.[3] In 1919 Höhnel recombined Spegazzini's species as Cladosterigma clavariellum and treated it as the same species as Patouillard's taxon,[4] leaving Cladosterigma with a single accepted species and C. fusisporum in synonymy.[5]
For more than a century Cladosterigma was variously regarded as a basidiomycete (even compared with Clavaria) and placed among jelly fungi before later authors questioned that interpretation. Multi-locus DNA data finally resolved it as an ascomycete in the order Graphidales (family Gomphillaceae), where it represents an early-diverging lineage in a family otherwise dominated by lichen-forming fungi; within the order it is the first non-lichenicolous mycoparasitic member.[5]