| Fissurina | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Fissurina subcontexta | |
Scientific classification  | |
| Kingdom: | Fungi |
| Division: | Ascomycota |
| Class: | Lecanoromycetes |
| Order: | Graphidales |
| Family: | Graphidaceae |
| Genus: | Fissurina Feé (1825) |
| Synonyms [1] | |
Fissurina is a genus of lichenized fungi in the family Graphidaceae. It has about 160 species, [2] most of which are found in tropical regions.
The genus was circumscribed by the French botanist Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée in an 1825 publication. [3] Some later authors preferred to use the name Fissurina to describe infrageneric (i.e., below genus level) groups of the genus Graphis , such as Edvard Vainio in 1921 who used it as a subgenus, [4] and Alexander Zahlbruckner (1923) [5] and Karl Redinger (1935), [6] who used the name for sections.
Fissurina is in the family Graphidaceae. [7] In 2018, [8] Kraichak and colleagues, using a "temporal phylogenetic" approach to identify temporal bands for specific taxonomic ranks, proposed placing Fissurina as the type genus of Fissurinaceae, a family originally proposed by Brendan P. Hodkinson in 2012. [9] This taxonomic proposal was rejected by Robert Lücking in a critical 2019 review of the temporal method for the classification of lichen-forming fungi, using this specific example to highlight several drawbacks of this approach. [10]
Fissurina is characterized by fissurine ascocarps (i.e., having a fissured or slit-like disc ), poorly developed and non- carbonized or weakly carbonized exciple s, and 1-8 spored asci that make thick-walled, trans-septate or muriform hyaline ascospores often with a halo. Acanthothecis is a similar genus with warty paraphyses and periphysoids but can be differentiated from Fissurina by the cylindrical spore locules without a thick jelly-like spore wall. Graphis differs from Fissurina by its carbonized, well-developed exciple (labia) and ascospores without a halo. [11]
