Battarrea phalloides and B. stevenii, insight into a long-standing taxonomic puzzle

Two species of Battarrea Pers., B. phalloides and B. stevenii, have been ci ted in Europe. According to some authors, B. phalloides has a gelatinous vo lva and smaller basidiomata than B. stevenii. However, other authors consid er that these characters are not enough to separate the taxa at the species level, and consider B. stevenii a synonym of B. phalloides. The main purpo se of this work was to try to resolve the boundaries between the two taxa, not only based on macroscopic and microscopic characters, but also through molecular techniques. Thirty-five basidiomata from different geographical a reas (Austria, Burundi, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Spain) were examine d to define the macroscopic and microscopic characters. The collections wer e investigated with regard to basidioma size, presence or absence of gelati nous hyphae in the volva, spore size and spore ornamentation. No difference s were observed in spore size. From 16 basidiomata, amplifications of the I TS regions, including 5.8S rDNA were obtained. No gelatinous hyphae were fo und in the volva of the B. phalloides basidiomata, and no other morphologic al characters support the separation of the two taxa. The sequence alignmen t of the specimens has no unambiguous parts and the sequence dissimilaritie s within B. phalloides specimens are higher than those between B. stevenii and B. phalloides, suggesting that both taxa belong to the same species.