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Agaricales

Order of mushrooms

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  • 3 chapters

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History, classification and phylogeny

In his three volumes of Systema Mycologicum published between 1821 and 1832, Elias Fries put almost all of the fleshy, gill-forming mushrooms in the genus Agaricus. He organized the large genus into "tribes", the names of many of which still exist as common genera of today. Fries later elevated several of these tribes to generic level, but later authors—including Gillet, Karsten, Kummer, Quélet, and Staude—made most of the changes. Fries based his classification on macroscopic characters of the fruit bodies and color of the spore print. His system had been widely used as it had the advantage that many genera could be readily identified based on characters observable in the field. Fries's classification was later challenged when microscopic studies of basidiocarp structure, initiated by Fayod and Patouillard, demonstrated several of Fries's groupings were unnatural. In the twentieth century, Rolf Singer's influential work The Agaricales in Modern Taxonomy, published in four editions spanning from 1951 to 1986, used both Fries's macroscopic characters and Fayod's microscopic characters to reorganize families and genera; his final classification included 230 genera within 18 families. Singer treated three major groups within the Agaricales sensu lato: the Agaricales sensu stricto, Boletineae, and Russulales. These groups are still accepted by modern treatments based on DNA analysis, as the euagarics clade, bolete clade, and russuloid clade.

Molecular phylogenetics research has demonstrated that the euagarics clade is roughly equivalent to Singer's Agaricales sensu stricto. A large-scale study by Brandon Matheny and colleagues used nucleic acid sequences representing six gene regions from 238 species in 146 genera to explore the phylogenetic grouping within the Agaricales. The analysis showed that most of the species tested could be grouped into six clades that were named the Agaricoid, Tricholomatoid, Marasmioid, Pluteoid, Hygrophoroid and Plicaturopsidoid clades.

Molecular studies have shown that agarics are more divergent than once thought. Agarics in the genera Russula and Lactarius, for example, belong to the order Russulales, whilst agarics in the genera Paxillus and Hygrophoropsis belong in the Boletales. Conversely some genera with non-agaric fruit bodies, such as the puffballs, bird's nest fungi, and many clavarioid fungi, belong in the Agaricales.

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