Fungi imperfecti

Fungi imperfecti is a historical grouping for fungi whose sexual reproductive stages were unknown, classified by their observable asexual forms. It is not a natural taxonomic group.

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Conidium: An asexual, nonmotile fungal spore formed without enclosure in a sporangium. Conidia were among the visible structures used to distinguish many members of this grouping.
Fungal life cycle: The sequence of developmental and reproductive stages through which a fungus passes. The group existed because only part of many fungi's life cycles was known.
Christiaan Hendrik Persoon: A Dutch mycologist who helped establish systematic classification of fungi in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His work helped shape early classification based on visible fungal structures.
Molecular phylogenetics: The reconstruction of evolutionary relationships using molecular sequence data. DNA comparisons can place asexual forms within lineages that morphology alone could not connect.
Conidiophore: A specialized hypha or cell that produces conidia. Its shape and arrangement helped characterize fungi known only from asexual reproduction.
Fungal spore: A reproductive or dispersal cell produced by fungi, capable of developing into a new individual. Asexual spores supplied the observable evidence used to recognize many species.
Elias Magnus Fries: A Swedish mycologist whose fungal classifications strongly influenced nineteenth-century taxonomy. His influential system organized fungi using observable features, including reproductive structures.
DNA barcoding: Species identification using standardized DNA sequence regions as genetic markers. Barcoding can identify fungi whose sexual stages are absent or unknown.
Hypha: A branching filament that forms the basic structural unit of most fungi. Hyphae produce the structures on which many diagnostic asexual spores form.
Meiosis: A cell division process that reduces chromosome number and produces genetically varied reproductive cells. Sexual stages, when found, revealed reproductive processes absent from the known asexual forms.