Chorioactis
Chorioactis is a genus of fungi that contains the single species Chorioacts geaster. The mushroom is commonly known as the devil’s cigar or the Texas star in the United States, while in Japan it is called kirinomitake. The fungus was first collected in 1893 by botanist Lucien Marcus Underwood.
About Chorioactis in brief
Chorioactis is a genus of fungi that contains the single species Chorioacts geaster. The mushroom is commonly known as the devil’s cigar or the Texas star in the United States, while in Japan it is called kirinomitake. The fruit body, which grows on the stumps or dead roots of cedar elms or dead oaks, somewhat resembles a dark brown or black cigar before it splits open radially into a starlike arrangement of four to seven leathery rays. The fungus was first collected in 1893 by botanist Lucien Marcus Underwood, who sent the specimens to mycologist Charles Horton Peck for identification. In 2009, Japanese researchers reported discovering a form of the fungus missing the sexual stage of its lifecycle; this asexual state was named Kumanasamuha geaster and is found in Kyushu, Japan. The genus was established as a valid genus in 1968 by Finn-Egil Eckblad in his comprehensive monograph about the Discomycetes. Phylogenetic analyses of the past decade have clarified the fungus’s classification: ChorioActis, along with three other genera, make up the family Chorioactidaceae, a grouping of related fungi formally acknowledged in 2008. It was not until 1999 that the results of a phylogenetic analysis firmly challenged the traditional classification, showing C.geaster to be part of a distinct lineage or clade, that includes four species in the genera Urnula, Desmazlla, Neournierella, and Wolfina, that it was shown that these genera represented a sister clade of these four.
Historically, Chorio actis was considered to be in the family Sarcosomataceae, despite inconsistencies in the microscopic structure of the ascus, the saclike structure in which spores are formed. In 1902, student mycologists Elsie Kupfer questioned the proposed classification of various species in a generaUrnula and Geopyxis. She concluded that the Texan species was so dissimilar as to warrant its own genus, which she named Chorio Actis. In 1994, a study of the features of the ascospores concluded that ChorioACTis was more closely aligned with the family Sarcososomateae than the other members of the family, although it conceded that the layering of the cells of the walls of the cell differed considerably from the other family members. The species was not accepted as avalid genus until 1968, but it was later corroborated when analysis corroborated that these cladea were distributed among both families. It is not known whether the species is not not only a sister species of these sister genera but also a species in its own right, as it is found only in select locales in Texas.
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This page is based on the article Chorioactis published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
