Evolutionary innovations of Fungi in modern and fossil resins

This project increases knowledge of fungal evolution by focusing firstly on extant fungi that live on resinous exudates of extant plants and secondly on fungal microfossils preserved in Mesozoic and Cenozoic ambers. An important supporting task involves completing DNA-sequence datasets of extant fungal lineages that are known to have fossilized representatives preserved in amber. Until now the nearly non-existent fossil record and the common application of incomplete molecular datasets has hindered divergence time estimation and distorted interpretation of diversification patterns in different fungal lineages. Integrative combination of morphological and molecular data helps to reconstruct the diversification of morphology and ecological strategies in several lineages of lichen-symbiotic and resinicolous ascomycetes and allows the comparison of diversification patterns in several unrelated groups of fungi.