The Hyphal Tip

A recent paper in MBE presents evidence that the Taphrinomycota (containing S. pombe and Pneumocystis) are in fact a monophyletic group. This is considered an early branch in the Ascomycota with the Pezizomycotina (filamentous ascomycete fungi like Neurospora and Aspergillus) and Saccharomycotina (fungi mainly with yeast forms including Candida and Saccharomyces). The monophyly of Taphrinomyoctina fungi is something that has been fairly accepted but there are a few publications reporting conflicting evidence in some sets gene trees. This conflict is most likely due to Long Branch Attraction (LBA) and the Philippe lab has long worked on this problem of LBA working to develop tools like PhyloBayes that attempt to correct for LBA with a parameter rich model and using lots of data (like whole [...]