Jaagichlorella species

Darienko, Tatyana & Pröschold, Thomas, 2019, The genus Jaagichlorella Reisigl (Trebouxiophyceae, Chlorophyta) and its close relatives: an evolutionary puzzle, Phytotaxa 388 (1), pp. 47-68 : 65

Distribution of Jaagichlorella species

The six species of Jaagichlorella known have different distribution patterns. The strains of J. luteoviridis were isolated from aquatic habitats or from sap of the bark of trees. Interestingly, these strains are in culture collections for a long time and no recent sequences of this species have been published. The other species of Jaagichlorella were collected from different terrestrial habitats, J. africana from a concrete wall, J. roystonensis from bark of trees and artificial hard substrates, J. hainangensis from bark of tree, J. sphaerica is a photobiont of a lichen, and J. geometrica was isolated from the rhizosphere of a plant. In addition, Sanders et al. (2016) found Jaagichlorella (designated as Heveochlorella ) as a photobiont in different lichens. Our BLAST N search of ITS-2 sequences (100% coverage,>97% identity) revealed almost no new entries in GenBank. Only three entries (FJ028714, FJ028717, and FJ028720) of Jaagichlorella geometrica could be found using this algorithm. These uncultured clones are from the town hall of San Sebastian ( Spain). This indicates that J. geometrica is probably widely distributed. Summarizing, it seems that species of Jaagichlorella belong to rare taxa distributed in aquatic and mainly in terrestrial habitats with the exception of soil. They have a worldwide distribution pattern, but can be rarely found, which maybe explains that Jaagichlorella has not been recorded using NGS approaches.