Abstract
Stereocaulon alpinum is a lichenized fungus commonly found in the Antarctic, circumarctic, alpine, and in mountainous areas of temperate regions. It forms a tripartite lichen symbiosis together with trebouxioid green microalgae, as its primary photobiont, and cyanobacteria of the genus Nostoc inside delimited cephalodia. Previous DNA-based analyses revealed two lineages for this fungus. This research discusses the morphological and chemical circumscription of S. alpinum and its geographic distribution and, to this end, we included new DNA data from the mycobiont and its photosynthetic partners. Phylogenetic reconstructions rejected infraspecific categories and revealed that specimens from the southern hemisphere (maritime Antarctica and South America) formed a well-supported “bipolar clade” with specimens from Finland, Greenland, and Canada. In addition, S. alpinum also formed a “northern clade” with sequences from Europe and North Atlantic islands. In specimens from the southern hemisphere, the identified lineages of phyco- and cyanobionts were already known to be associated with other lichenized fungi. The phycobiont was identified as Asterochloris pseudoirregularis and the cyanobiont as a member of the genus Nostoc. The phenotypic differences among the southern hemisphere specimens examined in this study pointed towards a broad morphological circumscription of S. alpinum. Simultaneously, the available descriptions of S. alpinum collected in the northern hemisphere, including the type specimen, do not provide characters distinguishing them from the southern specimens. These two clades likely represent cryptic species, one new and potentially only recognized using genetic data. Additional integrative studies, including a comprehensive analysis of specimens from the northern hemisphere, are necessary to know the diversity contained in the lichens identified as Stereocaulon alpinum worldwide.
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Data availability
All specimens studied here are available in the CGMS herbarium (http://cgms.jbrj.gov.br/v2/consulta.php) as well as the sequences generated in the Genbank database (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/). See voucher information and accession numbers in Online Resource 1.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dr. Laurens Sparrius for sending a specimen of S. alpinum from Finland and Dr. Andre Aptroot for arranging this collaboration. We also want to thank to the CGMS curator Luciana Canêz who quickly attended our requests. Finally thanks to Dra. Mayara Scur and to Drs. Marcos Kitaura and Wellington Fava for collecting fresh specimens.
Funding
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. V. Torres received a Master fellowship (CAPES), and J.-M. Torres and A. Rodrigues received a Doctoral fellowship (CAPES). This was also supported by the Brazilian “Evolution and Dispersal of Antarctic Bipolar Species of Mosses and Lichens” project (MCTI/CNPq/FNDCT—Ação Transversal n° 64/2013).
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Conceptualization, methodology and validation, APL and JMT; field work, AAS and APL; morphological analyses, JMT; chemical analyses, AG, ACM and NKH; molecular analyses, APL and JMT; writing of original draft preparation, JMT, APL, AR and VT; writing, review, and editing, JMT, APL and AAS; funding acquisition, AAS and APL All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Supplementary file1 (XLSX 13 KB)Online Resources 1 Information about the specimens of Stereocaulon alpinum analysed in this study
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Supplementary file2 (XLSX 1029 KB)Online Resource 2 Information about nuITS, β-tubulin, Actin and 16s sequences analysed in this study
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Supplementary file3 (TIF 4019 KB) Online Resource 3 Maximum clade credibility tree from Bayesian inference of nuITS sequences of Stereocaulon. Thickened branches correspond to high support values from bayesian inference (a priori probability ≥ 0.9) and from maximum likelihood (bootstrap ≥ 70) respectively. Red branches corresponding to the clades of Stereocaulon alpinum. The sequences here generated of S. alpinum are in the bipolar clade and are marked in bold
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Supplementary file4 (TIF 2214 KB)Online Resource 4 Maximum clade credibility tree from Bayesian inference of the concatenated date set of nuITS and β-tubulin sequences of Stereocaulon. Thickened branches correspond to high support values from bayesian inference (a priori probability ≥ 0.9) and from maximum likelihood (bootstrap ≥ 70) respectively. Red branches corresponding to the clades of Stereocaulon alpinum. The sequences here generated of S. alpinum are in the bipolar clade and are marked in bold
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Torres, J.M., Torres, V.O., Rodrigues, A.S. et al. Lineages of the lichen-forming fungus Stereocaulon alpinum and their photobionts in southern South America and maritime Antarctica. Polar Biol 46, 865–879 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-023-03168-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-023-03168-y