Polyporales

The Polyporales are an order of about 1,800 species of fungi in the division Basidiomycota. The order includes some (but not all) polypores as well as many corticioid fungi and a few agarics (mainly in the genus Lentinus). Many species within the order are saprotrophic, most of them wood-rotters. Some genera, such as Ganoderma and Fomes, contain species that attack living tissues and then continue to degrade the wood of their dead hosts. Those of economic importance include several important pathogens of trees and a few species that cause damage by rotting structural timber. Some of the Polyporales are commercially cultivated and marketed for use as food items or in traditional Chinese medicine. The order was originally proposed in 1926 by Swiss mycologist Ernst Albert Gäumann to accommodate species within the phylum Basidiomycota producing basidiocarps (fruit bodies) showing a gymnocapous mode of development (forming the spore-bearing surface externally). As such, the order included the ten families Brachybasidiaceae, Corticiaceae, Clavariaceae, Cyphellaceae, Dictyolaceae, Fistulinaceae, Polyporaceae, Radulaceae, Tulasnellaceae, and Vuilleminiaceae, representing a mix of poroid, corticioid, cyphelloid, and clavarioid fungi. In a series of publications in 1932, E. J. H. Corner explained the occurrence of different types of hyphae in the fruit bodies of polypore fungi. He introduced the concept of hyphal analysis, which later become a fundamental character in polypore taxonomy.