Relationships among ascomycetous yeast genera (subphylum Saccharomycotina, phylum Ascomycota) have been uncertain. In the present study, type species of 70 currently recognized genera are compared from divergence in the nearly entire nuclear gene sequences for large subunit rRNA, small subunit (SSU) rRNA, translation elongation factor-1α, and RNA polymerase II, subunits 1 (RPB1) and 2 (RPB2). The analysis substantiates earlier proposals that all known ascomycetous yeast genera now assigned to the Saccharomycotina represent a single clade. Maximum likelihood analysis resolved the taxa into eight large multigenus clades and four-one- and two-genus clades. Maximum parsimony and neighbor-joining analyses gave similar results. Genera of the family Saccharomycetaceae remain as one large clade as previously demonstrated, to which the genus Cyniclomyces is now assigned. Pichia, Saturnispora, Kregervanrija, Dekkera, Ogataea and Ambrosiozyma are members of a single large clade, which is separate from the clade that includes Barnettozyma, Cyberlindnera, Phaffomyces, Starmera and Wickerhamomyces. Other clades include Kodamaea, Metschnikowia, Debaryomyces, Cephaloascus and related genera, which are separate from the clade that includes Zygoascus, Trichomonascus, Yarrowia and others. This study once again demonstrates that there is limited congruence between a system of classification based on phenotype and a system determined from DNA sequences.
Published 2012. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.