Six unrecorded macrofungi from the Royal Tombs (Donggureung and Seooreung) of the Joseon Dynasty and Jongmyo Shrine, Korea

Macrofungi are visible to the naked eye (≥1 cm in size) and fruit on woody substrate, leaf litter, decaying organic matter, soil or fungi (Kirk et al., 2008). Most macrofungi belong to the Basidiomycota, but some to the Ascomycota. They play important ecological roles in nutrient cycles as decomposers and symbionts in forest ecosystems globally (Dix and Webster, 1995). Moreover, macrofungi have great potential in food production, cosmetics, and medicinal uses (Wasser, 2002; Parvez et al., 2007). As a result, a great deal of effort has been dedicated to the excavation of indigenous species at local and regional scales. Macrofungi have been identified based on macro and microscopic characteristics. However, morphological identification is not be reliable when basidiocarps are collected in an immature state and many have different morphology depending on the environment (Grand et al., 2011; Park et al., 2014; Grilli et al., 2016). In addition, some species have similar morphological features, which may result in misidentification (Reeves and Welden, 1967; Grand et al., 2011). Accumulated DNA sequence information could help to facilitate species identification (Moncalvo et al., 2000; Taylor et al., 2000; Nilsson et al., 2008; Schoch et al., 2012; Kõljalg et al., 2013) and the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region has been proposed as a fungal barcode region (Schoch et al., 2012). The National Institute of Biological Resources organized several projects to discover Korean indigenous macrofungi. The results of these projects have been a tremendous increase in the inventory of macrofungi in Korea. Both morphological characters and molecular analysis have been used to discover new species or unrecorded species in Korea (Park et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2015; Cho et al., 2016). In this study, we surveyed macrofungi in the Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty and Jongmyo Shrine, designated as World Heritage sites by UNESCO (http://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/kr), and discovered six previously unrecorded species in Korea. We provide morphological characteristics in detail and phylogenetic relationship with closely related species.