We agree with the reviewer, this part was formulated clumsily. What we meant was actually exactly what the reviewer means. The two groups were polyphyletic and we could only chose a monophyletic group when analysing them together. We changed the sentence to: “… by two genera that were monophyletic only when taken together in the database used, e.g., Leptolyngbia and Chamaesiphon …” In accordance we did not check for relatedness of the taxa, neither in this one nor for any other one.
I believe that the article with proposed changes will be useful for future research.