The phylogenetic relationships of the anaerobic chytridiomycetous gut fungi (Neocallimasticaceae) and the Chytridiomycota. I. Cladistic analysis of rRNA sequences

To clarify the phylogenetic relationships of the Chytridiomycota and the anaerobic fungi from the rumen and caecum of herbivorous animals, we analyzed the partial 18S rRNA sequences from 28 species ranging from protists to mammals and internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) and its adjacent sequences from four gut fungi and one chytrid by using three algorithms from the Phylogeny Inference Package (PHYLip). To get the confidence limits for each branch, we applied bootstrapping for each algorithm. Our analysis on partial 18S rRNA sequences shows that the Chytridiomycota are clustered with other fungi with 98, 76, and 30% confidences in the Fitch - Margoliash, neighbour-joining, and maximum parsimony algorithms. None of these three algorithms place any of 17 protists from 12 phyla with the fungi, including the chytrids. The same analysis also shows that the Spizellomycetales and Chytridiales cluster with the gut fungi but does not identify which order is closest to them. These results suggest that the Chytridiomycota, including the gut fungi, are indeed fungi but the gut fungi might not belong to the Spizellomycetales. The phylogenetic trees generated by the above three algorithms, plus the maximum likelihood algorithm, based on ITS1 and its adjacent regions show that Anaeromyces is more distant from Orpinomyces, Neocallimastix, and Piromyces. However, they failed to determine the relationships among the last three genera.