Polyphasic approach in fungal taxonomy

Taxonomy of micromycetes continuously experienced a number of specific difficulties. Advances in molecular phylogeny were an important achievement for fungal taxonomy during the last two decades. Usage of multilocus sequencing in combination with phylogenetic analysis is technically convenient and methodologically reasonable for species delimitation. They work within the frames of evolutionary species concept which is the most popular in mycology now and obviously will save popularity in the nearest future. The most proper tool to define species boundaries is phylogenetic species recognition. However, this well -developed approach sometimes gives no opportunity to clearly recover biodiversity structure and then perform easy taxa identification. Arising in the 1970th in bacteriology, polyphasic taxonomy became in 2000th fairly popular in mycology. Nowadays it is comprehended as consensus taxonomy performing definition of taxa extension based on comparative analysis of all available characters. This approach is not absolutely new. Similar concepts have been utilized in mycology and other biological disciplines earlier. In the article we review the modern practice of polyphasic approach application in the mycology. A special part of the review is dedicated to diversity of features available for a mycologist and to appropriateness of their usage in taxonomy in particular within the scope of the polyphasic approach. This approach is reasonable to apply when phylogenetic recognition gives no satisfactory results, for instance, in case of insufficient number of sequenced loci or in case of analysis of recently diverged species. Furthermore, polyphasic approach is proper for making the taxonomic hypotheses to test them with phylogenetic methods and to create appropriate sample strain sets.