Cortinarius barcoding database of Western Siberia and adjacent areas

The genus Cortinarius (Pers.) Grays. is a highly diverse and ecologically crucial group of ectomycorrhizal fungi in boreal forests. Despite a long history of mycological study in Russia, a comprehensive, molecularly validated inventory of its diversity in Western Siberia has been lacking. Global genetic resources are essential for modern fungal research, yet such a curated, regional dataset for this complex genus has not been previously available for this region.

This paper describes a curated database of 624 Cortinarius specimens from Western Siberia and adjacent regions, resulting in 624 high-quality ITS sequences. The dataset includes detailed collection metadata, morphological descriptions and photographic documentation, all standardised and linked to DNA sequence data originally managed in Specify 7. The sequences were processed through a rigorous bioinformatics pipeline with strict quality controls and assigned provisional taxonomy using a defined BLAST protocol against international reference databases. The complete dataset, including raw sequences, specimen data and collection images, has been deposited in international repositories (Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) (https://doi.org/10.15468/4v8km8), Sequence Reads Archive (SRA) and GenBank), providing a foundational resource for future taxonomic, phylogenetic and ecological studies on this key fungal genus in Western Siberia.