Elaphomyces anthracinus, a new hypogeous ascomycete record for Turkish mycota

: Elaphomyces anthracinus Vittad. is given as new record for the mycobiota of Turkey. The macro and micromorphological characters of the species are provided together with the collection locality, voucher number and the photographs related to its macro and micromorphologies


Introduction
Elaphomyces T. Nees is a widespread genus within the family Elaphomycetaceae (Ascomycota).Members of the genus generally bear the following characteristics: subglobose to globose spores, globose to subglobose 1-8 spored asci, a more or less powdery spore mass, fleshy to leathery peridium, a single chambered gleba, and globose to subglobose or irregular hypogeous ascomata (Castellano et al., 2016(Castellano et al., , 2018)).They generally form ectomycorrhizal association, and widespread in temperate and subtropical forests.
In this paper Elaphomyces anthracinus is presented as the seventh member of the genus in Turkey, based on the collection from Tonya district of Trabzon province.
The study aims to make a contribution to the macrofungal biodiversity of the Trabzon and Turkey.

Materials and Method
Fruit bodies of E. anthracinus were collected from Tonya district of Trabzon province.They were photographed at natural habitats, and notes were taken about the morphological and ecological characteristics.Then the specimen was carried to the fungarium, and dried in an air conditioned room.Microscopic studies were performed on dried specimen under a Nikon Eclipse Ci-S trinocular light microscope.The specimens were mounted in water and Melzer reagent.The samples were identified with the help of Hawker (1954), Moreno et al. (1991), Pegler et al. (1993), Arroyo et al. (2005), Montecchi and Sarasini (2000), Paz et al. (2017).The collected specimen are kept at Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University, Science Faculty, Department of Biology, Karaman, Turkey.Macroscopic and microscopic features: Ascoma hypogeous, 19.5 mm in diameter, subglobose to globose, with carbonaceous exterior, umbilicate, lacking a true sterile base, minutely verrucose, or somewhat covered with binding soil particles, dark brown to black.Peridium 2-3 mm thick and composed of two layers.Thinner cortex carbonaceous, black, hard and slightly grainy.Inner peridium thick, whitish to pale grey or light brownish, composed of subhyaline, filamentous hyphae.Gleba whitish or greyish at first, cottony, at maturity filled with a powdery mass of spores (Fig. 1).Glebal hyphae narrow and branched.Asci 30-50 µm diam., subglobose, thin-walled, usually with randomly 8-spored, evanescent.Ascospores 13-19 μm in diameter, globose, hyaline at first, pale to dark brown-blackish, nearly black when mature, and almost opaque at maturity, ornamented with numerous shallow alveoli (Fig. 2).

Discussions
Elaphomyces anthracinus was given as new record for Turkish mycobiota as the seventh member of the genus Elaphomyces.In general, macro and micromorphology are in agreement with those given in literature.Since the fruit bodies of E. anthracinus recall the traditional charcoal balls, macroscopical identification does not offer any difficulty.The very small and blackish spores also distinguish E. anthracinus from the other Elaphomyces species with blackish and almost smooth surface.
Regarding the previous Turkish collections of Elaphomyces, five of them, E. cyanosporus, E. granulatus, E. leucocarpus, E. muricatus and E. septatus, have notably larger spores (with a minimum size of 19 μm), and can easily be distinguished from E. anthracinus.On the other hand, the sixth one, E. citrinus, has much more smaller spores (10.5-12.5 μm) compared to E. anthracinus.