A New Combination Species of Freshwater Cladophorales and Its Phylogenetic Analysis

Four filamentous green algal samples of Cladophorales were collected from Hubei Province during 2012-2014. The four specimens had a morphology very similar to that of Cladophora moravica Gardavský (1986). These algae were more closely related to species of Pithophoraceae than to other Cladophora species. Phylogenetic analysis based on SSU and LSU rDNA sequences indicated that all four samples belonged to the clade of Aegagropilopsis, which is a distinct genus in Pithophoraceae. Thus, a new combination-Aegagropilopsis moravica (Dvořák) Zhao et Liu com. nov. - was proposed. Currently, with only three species (Aegagropilopsis moravica, Aegagropilopsis sterrocladia and Aegagropilopsis clavuligera), Aegagropilopsis is easily morphologically confused with Aegagropila species. Therefore, nuclear genome sequence analysis would be an efficient method to solve this problem.