Fungalpedia – Note 2103, Sporormiaceae

 

Sporormiaceae Munk

Citation when using this data: Hongsanan S et al. 2020 – Fungalpedia, Ascomycota.

Index Fungorum, Facesoffungi, MycoBank, GenBank.

Classification: Pleosporales, Pleosporomycetidae, Dothideomycetes, Pezizomycotina, Ascomycota, Fungi

Saprobic on wood, plant debris, soil, dung and exceptionally endophytic on various substrates. Sexual morph: Ascomata immersed to erumpent or superficial, globose to pyriform, solitary or gregarious, scattered, perithecioid or cleistothecioid, ascolocular pseudothecia, dark pigmented, membraneous or coriaceous. Peridium smooth or hairy, dark-pigmented cells of textura angularis, outermost cells thick-walled. Hamathecium comprising abundant cellular pseudoparaphyses, lacking periphyses. Asci usually 8–spored, fissitunicate, J-, clavate, globose or cylindrical, usually with a pedicel, apical apparatus scarcely developed, non-refractive, with a narrow endotunica. Ascospores often partly overlapping inside the asci, 1–3-seriate, sometimes fasciculate or crowded, oval to cylindrical, dark brown, exceptionally one-celled, usually septate and poly-celled, muriform, thick-walled, smooth, exceptionally ornamented, constricted at septa and fragmenting into part-spores at maturity, often with germ slits, with or without surrounded by a mucilaginous sheath. Asexual morph: Coelomycetous. Conidiomata subglobose, immersed, dark brown. Pycnidial wall dark brown to light brown cells of textura angularis. Conidiophores reduced to conidiogenous cells. Conidiogenous cells enteroblastic, phialidic, hyaline, oblong to clavate. Conidia oblong, suboboviod, hyaline to brown, 1-transverse septum.

Notes: Sporormiaceae was established by Munk (1957) with Sporormia as the type genus. The members of this family are known as saprobic on dung, plant debris, soil, wood or exceptionally endophytic (Hausmann et al. 2002, Burney et al. 2003, van Geel et al. 2003, Kruys & Wedin 2009, Gonzalez-Menendez et al. 2017). Barr (1987b) synonymized Sporormiaceae under Phaeotrichaceae. However, Phaeotrichaceae was considered as members of Sordariales based on its unitunicate asci, thus the family status of Sporormiaceae was reinstated as an independent family. In Barr (2000), coprophilous bitunicate fungi were classified into three families based on their morphology; these are Delitschiaceae, Phaeotrichaceae and Sporormiaceae. The robust phylogenetic analyses confirmed that Delitschiaceae, Phaeotrichaceae and Sporormiaceae represent a distant relationship (Kruys et al. 2006, Schoch et al. 2009a, Liu et al. 2017a). Sporormiaceae comprises nine genera, Chaetopreussia, Forliomyces, Pleophragmia, Preussia, Sparticola, Sporormia, Sporormiella, Sporormurispora and Westerdykella.

Type genus: Sporormia De Not.

 

References

Barr ME. 1987b – Prodromus to class Loculoascomycetes. Amherst, Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts, USA

Barr ME. 2000 – Notes on coprophilous bitunicate Ascomycetes. Mycotaxon 76, 105–112.

Burney DA, Robinson GS, Burney LP. 2003 – Sporormiella and the late Holocene extinctions in Madagascar. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100, 10800–10805.

Gonzalez-Menendez V, Martin J, Siles JA, Gonzalez-Tejero MR et al. 2017 – Biodiversity and chemotaxonomy of Preussia isolates from the Iberian Peninsula. Mycological Progress 16, 713–728.

Hausmann S, Lotter AF, Leeuwen JFN van, Ohlendorf CH et al. 2002 – Interactions of climate and land use documented in the varved sediments of Seebergsee in the Swiss Alps. The Holocene 12, 279–289.

Kruys Å, Eriksson OE, Wedin M. 2006 – Phylogenetic relationships of coprophilous Pleosporales (Dothideomycetes, Ascomycota), and the classification of some bitunicate taxa of unknown position. Mycological Research 110, 527–536.

Kruys Å, Wedin M. 2009 – Phylogenetic relationships and an assessment of traditionally used taxonomic characters in the Sporormiaceae (Pleosporales, Dothideomycetes, Ascomycota), utilising multi-gene phylogenies. System Biodivers 7, 465–478.

Liu JK, Hyde KD, Jeewon R, Phillips AJ et al. 2017a – Ranking higher taxa using divergence times: a case study in Dothideomycetes. Fungal Diversity 84, 75–99.

Munk A. 1957 – Danish pyrenomycetes: A preliminary flora. Dansk Botanisk Arkiv 17, 1–491.

Schoch CL, Crous PW, Groenewald JZ, Boehm EWA et al. 2009a – A class-wide phylogenetic assessment of Dothideomycetes. Studies in Mycology 64, 1–15.

van Geel B, Buurman J, Brinkkemper O, Schelvis J et al. 2003 – Environmental reconstruction of a Roman Period settlement site in Uitgeest (The Netherlands), with special reference to coprophilous fungi. Journal of Archaeological Science 30, 873–883.

 

Entry by

Sinang Hongsanan, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory for Plant Epigenetics, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Microbial Genetic Engineering, College of Life Science and Oceanography, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, People’s Republic of China, Center of Excellence in Fungal Research, Mae Fah Luang University, Chiang Rai 57100, Thailand, Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology, Faculty of Agriculture, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai 50002, Thailand 

 

Published online 25 March 2026

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