During the last 20 years,

remarkable progress has made in the study of molecular evolution of basidiomycetes with the introduction of molecular methods. The development of new statistical methods and this website advances in computational technology make the evaluation of evolution possible. In particular, with the invention and the development of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, phylogenetic analysis of DNA or protein sequences has become a powerful tool for studying molecular evolution in fungi (White et al. 1990; Bruns et al. 1992; Nei and Kumar 2000). Ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences have provided a wealth of information concerning phylogenetic relationships (Hillis and Dixon 1991), and studies of rDNA sequences have been used to infer phylogenetic history across a very broad spectrum, from studies among the basal lineages of life to relationships among closely related species find more and populations. Sequence data from ribosomal DNA (i.e. nSSU and nLSU rDNA), mtDNA and protein coding genes (e.g. tef1, rpb1, rpb2) have been used in fungal systematic studies (e.g. Swann and Taylor 1995; Fell et al. 2000; Lutzoni et al. 2004; Matheny et al. 2007a, b, c). Classification in the basidiomycota Before the molecular

era, basidiomycetes were usually divided into Phragmobasidiomycetes and Holobasidiomycetes, or Heterobasidiomycetes and Homobasidiomycetes. Molecular phylogenetic data showed that a separation of heterobasidiomycetes from homobasidiomycetes is impossible, and, thus, such historical concepts have to be abandoned (Weiß et al. 2004a). Molecular phylogenetic studies have led to significant advances in the Resveratrol understanding of the higher-level relationships of basidiomycetes, and consequently, the whole taxonomic hierarchy of the Basidiomycota, as in the remaining other groups of the Fungi, has been dramatically

altered. Under the umbrella of the Deep Hypha Research Coordination Network and Assembling the Fungal Tree of Life project (Lutzoni et al. 2004; Blackwell et al. 2007), and additional projects, a few major publications elucidating relationships within the Fungi appeared in the last few years (Bauer et al. 2006; James et al. 2006; Liu et al. 2006; Aime et al. 2007). Within the Kingdom Fungi, molecular phylogenetic analyses support the monophyly of the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, and these are regarded as the subkingdom Dikarya (James et al. 2006). A comprehensive classification of Fungi based on phylogenetic results was proposed (Hibbett et al. 2007) and adopted by the Dictionary of the Fungi (Kirk et al. 2008).