''Albatrellus'' is a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus com ...

of 19 species of

mushroom A mushroom or toadstool is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground, on soil, or on its food source. ''Toadstool'' generally denotes one poisonous to humans. The standard for the name "mushroom" is t ...

-producing

fungi A fungus ( : fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately from ...

in the family Albatrellaceae. Species are common in northern

temperate In geography, the temperate climates of Earth occur in the middle latitudes (23.5° to 66.5° N/S of Equator), which span between the tropics and the polar regions of Earth. These zones generally have wider temperature ranges throughout t ...

forests, producing medium to large fleshy

fruit bodies The sporocarp (also known as fruiting body, fruit body or fruitbody) of fungi is a multicellular structure on which spore-producing structures, such as basidia or asci, are borne. The fruitbody is part of the sexual phase of a fungal life cyc ...

of various colors.

Taxonomy

British botanist Samuel Frederick Gray first described the genus in his 1821 work "A Natural Arrangement of British Plants". Parsimony analysis of

internal transcribed spacer Internal transcribed spacer (ITS) is the spacer DNA situated between the small-subunit ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and large-subunit rRNA genes in the chromosome or the corresponding transcribed region in the polycistronic rRNA precursor transcript. I ...

sequences of various ''Albatrellus'' species show that the genus is not

monophyletic In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gro ...

, and that the species may be divided into two

clade A clade (), also known as a monophyletic group or natural group, is a group of organisms that are monophyletic – that is, composed of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants – on a phylogenetic tree. Rather than the English term, ...

s. This corroborates prior

phylogenetic In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups o ...

analysis that suggested that ''Albatrellus'' consists of two separate groups with affinity to the Russuloid and

Polyporoid Polypores are a group of fungi that form large fruiting bodies with pores or tubes on the underside (see Delimitation for exceptions). They are a morphological group of basidiomycetes-like gilled mushrooms and hydnoid fungi, and not all polypor ...

clades.

Description

Species of ''Albatrellus'' are terrestrial, with fleshy

that differentiate into caps and

stipes Crucifixion is a method of capital punishment in which the victim is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross or beam and left to hang until eventual death from exhaustion and asphyxiation. It was used as a punishment by the Persians, Carthagin ...

; the stipe is either central or eccentric to lateral. Fruit bodies are solitary or in clusters with stem bases or cap margins fused.

Context Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to su ...

mostly tough-fleshy, white or becoming brightly colored. The

hymenophore A hymenophore refers to the hymenium-bearing structure of a fungal fruiting body. Hymenophores can be smooth surfaces, lamellae, folds, tubes, or teeth. The term was coined by Robert Hooke Robert Hooke FRS (; 18 July 16353 March 1703) was ...

is regularly poroid. The hyphal system is monomitic, the generative

hyphae A hypha (; ) is a long, branching, filamentous structure of a fungus, oomycete, or actinobacterium. In most fungi, hyphae are the main mode of vegetative growth, and are collectively called a mycelium. Structure A hypha consists of one or ...

septate with or without clamp connections, with thin or somewhat thick, amyloid or inamyloid, indextrinoid and acyanophilous walls; the majority of

are distinctly inflated (the fundamental hyphae). The basidiospores are

ellipsoid An ellipsoid is a surface that may be obtained from a sphere by deforming it by means of directional scalings, or more generally, of an affine transformation. An ellipsoid is a quadric surface; that is, a surface that may be defined as the ...

to roughly spherical in shape, thin-walled to slightly thick-walled, with smooth, amyloid or inamyloid, indextrinoid and acyanophilous walls.

Distribution

Twelve species of ''Albatrellus'' occur in North America. The edible ''

Albatrellus ovinus ''Albatrellus ovinus'' (commonly known as Sheep Polypore) is a terrestrial polypore fungus found in western North America, and Northern Europe. It is very closely related to the rarer '' A. subrubescens'', from which it may be distinguished micr ...

'' is sold commercially in

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

. The ''Dictionary of the Fungi'' estimates there to be 16 species in the genus, but three new species ('' A. fumosus'', '' A. microcarpus'', '' A. tibetanus'') were described from China in 2008.

Species

2012-09-10 Albatrellus flettii Morse ex Pouzar 260834

References

Extensive comparative discussion of some species at

Albatrellus subrubescens ''Albatrellus subrubescens'' is a species of polypore fungus in the family Albatrellaceae. The fruit bodies (mushrooms) of the fungus have whitish to pale buff-colored caps that can reach up to in diameter, and stems up to long and thic ...

{{Taxonbar, from=Q1073187 Russulales Russulales genera Taxa named by Samuel Frederick Gray Taxa described in 1821