Notes:
The earliest sect./subsect. Scabra I have ever found. Must be the boatloads of rain NJ has been getting this month.
A single immature fruiting body with a damaged cap found near a lone Betula lenta. Likely conspecific with obs 287648 because both came from exactly the same spot.
The 2017 collection failed to produce an ITS sequence likely due to poor material quality. Here is an opportunity to take another stab at it from this thoroughly dried voucher, as well as from a fresh tissue sample stored in CTAB buffer.
The staining of the exposed flesh shown in photo suggests this could be Leccinum snellii. Note that the 2017 collection didn’t show any visible reddening of the flesh.
DNA Sequencing Results & Discussion (posted on 12-May-20):
> A clean and contiguous nrDNA sequence supported by forward and reverse reads was obtained from this collection by Dr. Kudzma and posted to this observation. It consists of the full-length nrITS sequence of 1138 bps bookended by short fragments of nrSSU and nrLSU. Like it is the case with genus Leccinum as a whole, the ITS1 region in this organism/taxon is much longer than ITS1 of other members of Boletaceae, 666 nucleotides to be exact. The highly conserved 5.8S sublocus is of the standard length of 161 bps. This makes ITS2 311 bps long. There are no ambiguous sites, it’s a single haplotype.
> This sequence is a 100% match to the full-length ITS of obs 330112. ITS places this taxon in the “snellii group”, as current evidence (GenBank data) indicates more than one taxon involved. For more details, see MO330112 for a thorough analysis of the sequencing data. Interestingly, MO370555 is, so far, the only voucher of this species that exhibits red staining of the exposed context (perhaps this has to do with moisture content in the flesh). Additional collections of this species confirmed by ITS – obs 281664 and obs 288622 (MycoFlora sequencing; identical ITS1 region) – also lack flesh reddening.