Abstract The taxonomy of micromycetes always experienced a number of specific problems. The development of molecular phylogeny in the last two decades became an important achievement for fungal taxonomy. The use of multilocus sequencing combined with phylogenetic analysis seems to be the most convenient and reasonable in the methodological aspect for species delimitation within the frames of the evolutionary species concept, which is the most popular among mycologists now and, obviously, will remain popular in the nearest future. The most proper tool for species delimitation is phylogenetic species recognition. However this well-developed approach sometimes allows neither a clear recovery of the structure of biodiversity nor the easy identification of taxa. The so-called polyphasic taxonomy concept arose in the 1970s among bacteriologists; it also became quite popular in mycology in the 2000s. Nowadays, it is considered as consensus taxonomy, i.e., a definition of taxa based on a comparative analysis of all available traits. This review describes the process of the formation of the polyphasic approach and the modern practice of its application in mycology. A special part of the review examines the diversity of traits available for a mycologist and the expediency of their use in taxonomy, in particular, within the limits of the polyphasic approach. It is concluded that this approach is reasonable when phylogenetic recognition provides no satisfactory results (e.g., in the case of a small number of sequenced genes or the analysis of recently diverged species). In additional, the polyphasic approach is suitable for the formation of taxonomic hypotheses that will be examined with phylogenetic methods and that can be further used as a basis to form the appropriate strain samplings.
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