Elliptochloris Tschermak-Woess.

Elliptochloris forms ellipsoid to globose, sometimes slightly irregular cells (Fig. 8). Chloroplasts can vary greatly in shape: parietal, striate, or hollow-spherical, bilobed, reticulate, or lobe-less, with or without a pyrenoid. Reproduction is by two types of autospores, either 2–4 large spherical (S-type) or 16–32 smaller elongated (E-type) cells. Both types of autospores often occur simultaneously (Darienko et al. 2016). The genus currently includes eight accepted species (Guiry & Guiry 2022). Half of them ( E. bilobata, E. perforata, E. reniformis and E. subsphaerica) forms lichens (Voytsekhovich et al. 2011; Darienko et al. 2016; Masumoto 2020).