A re-evaluation of the Chaetothyriales using criteria of comparative biology

Chaetothyriales is an ascomycetous order within Eurotiomycetes. The order is particularly known through the black yeasts and filamentous relatives that cause opportunistic infections in humans. All species in the order are consistently melanized. Ecology and habitats of species are highly diverse, and often rather extreme in terms of exposition and toxicity. Families are defined on the basis of evolutionary history, which is reconstructed by time of divergence and concepts of comparative biology using stochastical character mapping and a multi-rate Brownian motion model to reconstruct ecological ancestral character states. Ancestry is hypothesized to be with a rock-inhabiting life style. Ecological disparity increased significantly in late Jurassic, probably due to expansion of cytochromes followed by colonization of vacant ecospaces. Dramatic diversification took place subsequently, but at a low level of innovation resulting in strong niche conservatism for extant taxa. Families are ecologically different in degrees of specialization. One of the clades has adapted ant domatia, which are rich in hydrocarbons. In derived families, similar processes have enabled survival in domesticated environments rich in creosote and toxic hydrocarbons, and this ability might also explain the pronounced infectious ability of vertebrate hosts observed in these families. Conventional systems of morphological classification poorly correspond with recent phylogenetic data. Species are hypothesized to have low competitive ability against neighboring microbes, which interferes with their laboratory isolation on routine media. The dataset is unbalanced in that a large part of the extant biodiversity has not been analyzed by molecular methods, novel taxonomic entities being introduced at a regular pace. Our study comprises all available species sequenced to date for LSU and ITS, and a nomenclatural overview is provided. A limited number of species could not be assigned to any extant family.