Polyporaceae


The Polyporaceae are a family of poroid fungi belonging to the Basidiomycota. The flesh of their fruit bodies varies from soft to very tough. Most members of this family have their hymenium in vertical pores on the underside of the caps, but some of them have gills or gill-like structures. Many species are brackets, but others have a definite stipe – for example, Polyporus badius.
Most of these fungi have white spore powder but members of the genus Abundisporus have colored spores and produce yellowish spore prints. Cystidia are absent.

Taxonomy

In his 1838 work Epicrisis Systematis Mycologici seu Synopsis Hymenomycetum, Elias Magnus Fries introduced the "Polyporei". August Corda published the name validly the following year, retaining Fries's concept. American mycologist William Alphonso Murrill, in a series of publications in the early 1900s, classified the polypores into a more organized family of 78 genera, including 29 that were monotypic, and 39 that were new to science. Around the same time as Murrill, Curtis Gates Lloyd devoted considerable effort in sorting polypore taxonomy, and amassed a large and diverse collection of fruit bodies from around the world. In his 1953 monograph The Polyporaceae of the European U.S.S.R. and Caucasia, Apollinarii Semenovich Bondartsev included 54 genera in the Polyporaceae, which he further divided into five subfamilies and 10 tribes. Several works contributing to the systematics of the Polyporaceae were published in the following decades, including Marinus Anton Donk, Gordon Heriot Cunningham, and David Pegler.

Genera

, Index Fungorum accepts 114 genera and 1621 species in the Polyporaceae:
In a proposed family-level classification of the Polyporales based on molecular phylogenetics, Alfredo Justo and colleagues propose synonymizing the Ganodermataceae with the Polyporaceae, and accept 44 genera in this family: Abundisporus, Amauroderma, Cerarioporia, Colospora, Cryptoporus, Datronia, Datroniella, Dendrodontia, Dentocorticium, Dichomitus, Donkioporia, Earliella, Echinochaete, Epithele, Favolus, Fomes, Fomitella, Ganoderma, Grammothele, Grammothelopsis, Hexagonia, Haploporus, Hornodermoporus, Lentinus, Lignosus, Lopharia, Megasporia, Megasporoporia, Melanoderma, Microporellus, Microporus, Neodatronia, Neofavolus, Pachykytospora, Perenniporia, Perenniporiella, Pseudofavolus, Pyrofomes, Tinctoporellus, Tomophagus, Trametes, Truncospora, Vanderbylia, and Yuchengia.