Pucciniales

Avasthi, Shubhi, Gautam, Ajay Kumar, Verma, Rajnish Kumar, Niranjan, Mekala & Karunarathna, Samantha C., 2025, Checklist, typification information, and nomenclature status of rust fungi originated in India, Phytotaxa 713 (1), pp. 1-65 : 5

Pucciniales : a major order of the fungal kingdom

Order: Pucciniales Clem. & Shear, Gen. Fungi (2nd edn): 147 (1931).

Equivalent to Uredinales.

Exemplar genera: Puccinia Pers. 1801 , Uromyces (Link) Unger 1832 .

Within the class Pucciniomycetes, the Pucciniales is one of the biggest and most significant orders in the Basidiomycota. The order consists of many genera that cause considerable plant diseases on ferns, gymnosperms, and angiosperms as obligatory plant parasites, commonly referred to as rust fungi. These fungi are well-studied as they are responsible for many of the most destructive plant diseases. The rust disease name originates from the rusty tint of its urediniospores on various plant parts, which morphologically resemble rust on iron (Aime & McTaggart 2021, Gautam et al. 2021a). These obligate parasites have highly complex life cycles. They may contain up to five spore stages on two unrelated hosts (Cummins & Hiratsuka 2003). The Pucciniales comprise approximately 25% of all known species in Basidiomycota and approximately 8% of all described Fungi ( Kirk et al. 2008). It is estimated that the order Pucciniales comprises approximately 15 families, around 150 genera, and approximately 7,800 species. It is considered the most speciose order of fungi ( Kirk et al. 2008, Wijayawardene et al. 2020, 2022). A higher-rank classification for rust fungi was provided by Aime & McTaggart (2021) based on the evaluation of 80 % of accepted genera, including type species wherever possible and three DNA loci. They proposed seven suborders Araucariomycetineae, Melampsorineae, Mikronegeriineae, Raveneliineae, Rogerpetersoniineae, Skierkineae, and Uredinineae and eighteen (18) families Araucariomycetaceae , Coleosporiaceae , Crossopsoraceae , Gymnosporangiaceae , Melampsoraceae , Milesinaceae , Ochropsoraceae , Phakopsoraceae , Phragmidiaceae , Pileolariaceae , Pucciniaceae , Pucciniastraceae , Raveneliaceae , Rogerpetersoniaceae , Skierkaceae , Sphaerophragmiaceae , Tranzscheliaceae , and Zaghouaniaceae under the order Pucciniales (Aime & McTaggart 2021) . Recently, a new family, Nyssopsoraceae , has been introduced to accommodate the fungus Nyssopsora toonae , which was discovered on living leaves of Toona sinensis (Yadav et al. 2023) . Besides the variations in morphological characters, phylogenetic analyses based on the internal transcribed spacer (ITS), 28S large subunit (LSU), 18S small subunit (SSU), and cytochrome c-oxidase subunit 3 (CO3) clustered all the Nyssopsora spp. along with N. toonae in a separate and independent monophyletic lineage sister to Pucciniaceae in Pucciniales . However, rust fungi reported earlier from different locations in India still lack molecular data.