Notes,outline and divergence times of Basidiomycota

The Basidiomycota constitutes a major phylum of the kingdom Fungi and is second in species numbers to the Ascomycota.The present work provides an overview of all validly published,currently used basidiomycete genera to date in a single document.An outline of all genera of Basidiomycota is provided,which includes 1928 currently used genera names,with 1263 synonyms,which are distributed in 241 families,68 orders,18 classes and four subphyla.We provide brief notes for each accepted genus including information on classification,number of accepted species,type species,life mode,habitat,distribution,and sequence information.Furthermore,three phylogenetic analyses with combined LSU,SSU,5.8s,rpb1,rpb2,and ef1 datasets for the subphyla Agaricomycotina,Pucciniomycotina and Ustilaginomycotina are conducted,respectively.Divergence time estimates are provided to the family level with 632 species from 62 orders,168 families and 605 genera.Our study indicates that the divergence times of the subphyla in Basidiomycota are 406-430 Mya,classes are 211-383 Mya,and orders are 99-323 Mya,which are largely consistent with previous studies.In this study,all phylogenetically supported families were dated,with the families of Agaricomycotina diverging from 27-178 Mya,Pucciniomycotina from 85-222 Mya,and Ustilaginomycotina from 79-177 Mya.Divergence times as additional criterion in ranking provide additional evidence to resolve taxonomic problems in the Basidiomycota taxonomic system,and also provide a better understanding of their phylogeny and evolution.

A proto-monsoonal climate in the late Eocene of Southeast Asia:Evidence from a sedimentary record in central Myanmar

The Burma Terrane has yielded some of the earliest pieces of evidence for monsoonal rainfall in the Bay of Bengal.However,Burmese ecosystems and their potential monsoonal imprint remain poorly studied.This study focuses on the late Eocene Yaw Formation(23°N)in central Myanmar,which was located near the equator(c.5°N)during the Eocene.We quantitatively assessed the past vegetation,climate,and depositional environments with sporomorph diagrams,bioclimatic analysis,and sequence biostratigraphy.We calculated the palynological diversity and drew inferences with rarefaction analysis by comparing with four other middle to late Eocene tropical palynofloras.Palynological results highlight a high floristic diversity for the palynoflora throughout the section formed by six pollen zones characterized by different vegetation.They indicate that lowland evergreen forests and swamps dominated in the Eocene Burmese deltaic plains while terra firma areas were occupied by seasonal evergreen,seasonally dry,and deciduous forests.This vegetation pattern is typical to what is found around the Bay of Bengal today and supports a monsoon-like climate at the time of the Yaw Formation.Bioclimatic analysis further suggests that in the late Eocene,the Yaw Formation was more seasonal,drier,and cooler compared to modern-day climate at similar near-equatorial latitude.More seasonal and drier conditions can be explained by a well-marked seasonal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone(ITCZ),driver of proto-monsoonal rainfall.Cooler temperatures in the late Eocene of central Myanmar may be due to the lack of adequate modern analogues for the Eocene monsoonal climate,while those found at other three Eocene Asian paleobotanical sites(India and South China)may be caused by the effect of canopy evapotranspirational cooling.Our data suggest that paleoenvironmental change including two transgressive-regressive depositional sequences is controlled by global sea level change,which may be driven by climate change and tectonics.The high diversity of the Yaw Formation palynoflora,despite well-marked seasonality,is explained by its crossroads location for plant dispersals between India and Asia.

Influence of Organo-Metal Interactions on Regeneration of Exhausted Clay Mineral Sorbents in Soil Columns Loaded with Heavy Metals

Natural clay minerals can play an important role in crude remediation of wastewater polluted with the heavy metals(HMs) Cu, Zn and Ni. The presence and timing of addition of natural dissolved organic matter(DOM) have a significant effect on the HM removal by clay mineral sorbents. However, the influence of the presence of DOM on the remediation of the used clay mineral sorbents once saturated with HMs is largely unknown. To resolve this, clay mineral-rich soil column of varying composition, loaded(i) with Cu, Zn and Ni only,(ii) first with DOM followed by Cu, Zn and Ni, or(iii) with DOM, Cu, Zn and Ni simultaneously, was used in a set of desorption experiments. The soil columns were leached with 0.001 mol L^(-1)CaCl_2 dissolved in water as control eluent and 0.001 mol L^(-1)CaCl_2 dissolved in DOM as treatment eluent. During the preceding loading phase of the sorbent, the timing of DOM addition(sequential or concurrent with HMs) was found to have a significant influence on the subsequent removal of the HMs. In particular when the column was loaded with DOM and HMs simultaneously, largely irreversible co-precipitation took place. Our results indicate that the regeneration potential of clay mineral sorbents in wastewater treatment will be significantly reduced when the treated water is rich in DOM. In contrast, in manured agricultural fields(where HMs enter together with DOM), HM mobility will be lower than expected from interaction dynamics of HMs and clay minerals.

The world’s ten most feared fungi

An account is provided of the world’s ten most feared fungi.Within areas of interest,we have organized the entries in the order of concern.We put four human pathogens first as this is of concern to most people.This is followed by fungi producing mycotoxins that are highly harmful for humans;Aspergillus flavus,the main producer of aflatoxins,was used as an example.Problems due to indoor air fungi may also directly affect our health and we use Stachybotrys chartarum as an example.Not everyone collects and eats edible mushrooms.However,fatalities caused by mushroom intoxications often make news headlines and therefore we include one of the most poisonous of all mushrooms,Amanita phalloides,as an example.We then move on to the fungi that damage our dwellings causing serious anxiety by rotting our timber structures and flooring.Serpula lacrymans,which causes dry rot is an excellent example.The next example serves to represent all plant and forest pathogens.Here we chose Austropuccinia psidii as it is causing devastating effects in Australia and will probably do likewise in New Zealand.Finally,we chose an important amphibian pathogen which is causing serious declines in the numbers of frogs and other amphibians worldwide.Although we target the top ten most feared fungi,numerous others are causing serious concern to human health,plant production,forestry,other animals and our factories and dwellings.By highlighting ten feared fungi as an example,we aim to promote public awareness of the cost and importance of fungi.

Scaling Notebooks as Re-configurable Cloud Workflows

Literate computing environments,such as the Jupyter(i.e.,Jupyter Notebooks,JupyterLab,and JupyterHub),have been widely used in scientific studies;they allow users to interactively develop scientific code,test algorithms,and describe the scientific narratives of the experiments in an integrated document.To scale up scientific analyses,many implemented Jupyter environment architectures encapsulate the whole Jupyter notebooks as reproducible units and autoscale them on dedicated remote infrastructures(e.g.,highperformance computing and cloud computing environments).The existing solutions are stl limited in many ways,e.g.,1)the workflow(or pipeline)is implicit in a notebook,and some steps can be generically used by different code and executed in parallel,but because of the tight cell structure,all steps in the Jupyter notebook have to be executed sequentially and lack of the flexibility of reusing the core code fragments,and 2)there are performance bottlenecks that need to improve the parallelism and scalability when handling extensive input data and complex computation.In this work,we focus on how to manage the workflow in a notebook seamlessly.We 1)encapsulate the reusable cells as RESTful services and containerize them as portal components,2)provide a composition tool for describing workflow logic of those reusable components,and 3)automate the execution on remote cloud infrastructure.Empirically,we validate the solution's usability via a use case from the Ecology and Earth Science domain,illustrating the processing of massive Light Detection and Ranging(LiDAR)data.The demonstration and analysis show that our method is feasible,but that it needs further improvement,especially on integrating distributed workflow scheduling,automatic deployment,and execution to develop as a mature approach.