Two previously unknown species of Ganoderma — the genus of bracket fungi that includes the celebrated lingzhi or reishi mushroom — have been formally described from opposite sides of the Pacific, in a study that pairs classical microscopy with DNA-based family trees. One species was found growing on a living fig tree in the subtropical city of Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong Province. The other was collected from the trunk of a coconut palm in Nadi, Fiji. Both are published in the open-access journal MycoKeys, and both underscore how much biodiversity remains hidden inside a genus that humanity has been harvesting, trading, and worshipping for thousands of years.
The genus Ganoderma belongs to the order Polyporales, a group of wood-decaying fungi whose members produce tough, shelf-like fruiting bodies known as basidiomata. These are white-rot fungi, equipped with enzyme systems — including lignin peroxidase and manganese peroxidase — capable of dismantling lignocellulose, the structural scaffold of wood. That ability makes them indispensable recyclers in forest ecosystems, breaking down dead timber and returning carbon and nutrients to the soil. It also makes some of them dangerous: several Ganoderma species are aggressive pathogens of plantation trees, causing butt-rot and root-rot in rubber, oil palm, coconut, and timber species, with serious economic consequences for forestry and agriculture across the tropics.
The dual identity of Ganoderma — medicine and menace — is one reason taxonomists care so much about getting the species boundaries right. The genus has been used in traditional Asian medicine for millennia, prized for bioactive constituents including polysaccharides and triterpenoids, compounds associated in modern pharmacological studies with immunomodulatory, antitumor, and hypoglycemic properties. Yet accurate identification is notoriously difficult. When Moncalvo and Ryvarden documented 148 species in 1997, more than half were later reinterpreted as mere phenotypic variations of other taxa. Glossy, kidney-shaped brackets that look nearly identical in the field can conceal deep genetic divergence — which is precisely why the new study leaned on molecular tools as heavily as on morphology.
The research team, working from specimens deposited in the Fungal Herbarium of the Institute of Microbiology at Beijing Forestry University, analyzed seventeen collections gathered during field surveys in China, South Africa, Fiji, and other localities between March 2019 and July 2025. For the phylogenetic work, they assembled a dataset of 363 Ganoderma sequences — 137 from the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, 125 from the translation elongation factor 1-alpha gene (TEF1-α), and 101 from the second largest subunit of RNA polymerase II (RPB2) — representing 132 specimens and 67 species, including the two newcomers. Thirty-seven sequences were newly generated for the study. Alignments were built with MAFFT and refined manually, then analyzed under both Maximum Likelihood, using RAxML with 1,000 bootstrap replicates, and Bayesian Inference, run in MrBayes for five million generations. Branches were considered strongly supported when bootstrap values reached at least 70 percent and Bayesian posterior probabilities at least 0.95.
The first new species, named Ganoderma ficuum in honor of its host genus Ficus, was collected on a living fig tree in Shenzhen’s Futian District. Its fruiting bodies are annual, stalkless, and often overlap in imbricate tiers, with caps that arch dramatically upward into a pronounced central bump — a highly umbonate profile — marked by coarse radial furrows. The glossy, laccate surface matures to purplish brown or dark brown, and the pore surface beneath is densely packed, with six to eight circular to angular pores per millimeter. Under the microscope, the defining feature is the basidiospore: ellipsoid and distinctly truncated once the apical beak is shed at maturity, double-walled, with a moderately roughened inner wall, measuring roughly 6.2 to 7.6 micrometers long by 4 to 5 micrometers wide.
Genetically, G. ficuum occupies its own independent lineage, forming a sister clade to G. weberianum, G. sichuanense, G. mexicanum, and G. parvulum, with Bayesian support of 1.00. BLAST searches of its ITS sequence against GenBank returned top similarities of only about 98 percent to its nearest relatives — a gap large enough to confirm species-level distinctness. The morphology reinforces the genetics: G. weberianum has flat, fan-shaped caps that darken to nearly black, G. sichuanense grows on a stalk, and the neotropical G. mexicanum and G. parvulum both produce noticeably larger spores. The finding also raises China’s tally of described Ganoderma species to 54, cementing the country’s status as one of the genus’s global hotspots, thanks to terrain spanning tropical to cold-temperate climates.
The second species, Ganoderma fijiense, was collected in May 2023 from the trunk of a coconut palm in Nadi, Fiji — the first new Ganoderma described from the Pacific Island nations in recent memory. Its caps are kidney-shaped to round, reddish brown to dark brown, with blunt margins and concentric zones most visible near the edge. Its spores are narrowly ellipsoid, 8.2 to 11 micrometers long, with an inner wall densely ornamented with fine spinules — a texture clearly visible under oil immersion. Perhaps most distinctive is its internal anatomy: the context tissue carries black melanoid lines, a feature absent in its closest lookalike, G. cocoicola, which also shares its palm host. Pore density provides a second separator, at five to seven pores per millimeter versus four to six in G. cocoicola.
Phylogenetically, G. fijiense tells a story about islands and isolation. It clusters with strong support — 99 percent maximum likelihood bootstrap and a posterior probability of 1.00 — alongside G. zonatum, G. cocoicola, G. hochiminhense, and G. boninense, a group of palm-associated fungi. But its relatives are scattered across Southeast Asia, Australia, and Malaysia, while G. fijiense is so far known only from Fiji. The authors interpret this geographic disconnection as evidence that isolation has driven diversification within this palm-loving lineage, a pattern echoing the broader biogeographic puzzle of how Ganoderma species came to occupy every continent, whether through ancient land bridges or long-distance spore dispersal across oceans.
The study is not without acknowledged limitations. The phylogeny rests on a handful of gene fragments rather than whole genomes, and the authors call for genomic analyses to test the stability of the relationships they propose. Records of Ganoderma across the Pacific Island countries remain sparse, and they urge expanded field surveys across neighboring islands, combined with environmental data, to map how these fungi partition their ecological niches. Given that G. boninense — a close relative of the new Fijian species — devastates oil palm plantations across Southeast Asia, understanding the diversity and host preferences of this lineage is not merely academic. Every unnamed species is a pathogen risk that cannot be assessed and a potential pharmacological resource that cannot be explored.
For now, the two newcomers serve as a reminder that even in one of the most intensively studied fungal genera on Earth — a genus whose type species, G. lucidum, was formally established in 1881 and whose members have been collected from every continent — the census is still open. A fig tree in a Shenzhen park and a coconut palm on a Fijian beach were both harboring species new to science, distinguishable only by patient microscopy and three concatenated gene regions. Mycologists estimate that the vast majority of fungal species on the planet remain undescribed; these two bracket fungi, one Chinese and one Fijian, are the latest entries in a catalog that is growing faster than ever.
Subject of Research: Taxonomic description of two new Ganoderma bracket fungus species from China and Fiji using morphology and multi-gene phylogenetics
Article Title: Morphology and molecular phylogeny reveal two new species of Ganoderma ( Basidiomycota , Polyporales ) from China and Fiji
Article References: Liu, X.-Y., Liu, Y.-L., Lin, Z.-X., Lin, D.-M., Lin, X.-S., Cheng, Y.-M., Sun, Y.-F., & Cui, B.-K. (2026). Morphology and molecular phylogeny reveal two new species of Ganoderma (Basidiomycota, Polyporales) from China and Fiji. MycoKeys, 139, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.3897/mycokeys.139.208287
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3897/mycokeys.139.208287
Keywords: Ganoderma, mycology, new species, Polyporales, phylogenetics, ITS, TEF1-alpha, RPB2, Fiji, China, medicinal fungi, taxonomy
News Source: Roger Howard. (October 17, 2026). Two New Lingzhi Relatives Discovered in China and Fiji. Scienmag.
