The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies.Over the past decades, rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats. Yet, in spite of the progress of molecular methods, knowledge about functional properties of the fungal taxa is vague and interpretation of environmental studies in an ecologically meaningful manner remains challenging. In order to facilitate functional assignments and ecological interpretation of environmental studies we introduce a user friendly traits and character database FungalTraits operating at genus and species hypothesis levels. Combining the information from previous efforts such as FUNGuild and Fun Fun together with involvement of expert knowledge, we reannotated 10210 and 151 fungal and Stramenopila genera, respectively. This resulted in a stand-alone spreadsheet dataset covering 17 lifestyle related traits of fungal and Stramenopila genera, designed for rapid functional assignments of environmental studies. In order to assign the trait states to fungal species hypotheses, the scientific community of experts manually categorised and assigned available trait information to 697413 fungal ITS sequences. On the basis of those sequences we were able to summarise trait and host information into 92623 fungal species hypotheses at 1% dissimilarity threshold.

Mass mortality of oak trees has been occurring in Japan since the late 1980s. The fungus Raffaelea quercivora has been frequently isolated from discoloured sapwood in dead or wilting trees and inoculation experiments have shown it to be capable of causing wilting and xylem discoloration in several oak species, notably Quercus crispula and Q. serrata. In this study, we inoculated seedlings of six Fagaceae species with R. quercivora and, after 56 days, measured the vertical length of the discoloration and the areas of discoloured and non-conducting sapwood on stem cross-sections. The sapwood discoloration and the water non-conduction areas were larger in Q. crispula and Q. serrata than in the other species.

Nine isolates of Rickettsia tsutsugamushi were obtained from patients with Tsutsugamushi disease (scrub typhus) in Miyazaki Prefecture in Kyushu. Immunological analyses of these patients' sera and the isolates were performed by indirect immunofluorescence, indirect immunoperoxidase or immunoblotting techniques. In the analysis of reactions of the patients' sera with the prototype strains Gilliam, Karp, and Kato and with the isolates, sera from two patients, including Kawasaki, showed similar profiles and cross-reaction with the two isolates recovered from the corresponding patients, but reacted only weakly with the prototype strains. With guinea pig polyclonal antibodies against the isolate and prototype strains, Kawasaki strain showed some degree of cross-reaction with Gilliam strain but not with either Karp or Kato strain, nor with Shimokoshi strain which is known to be different antigenically from the prototype strains. Additionally, strain-specific murine monoclonal antibodies against Gilliam, Karp, and Kato strains did not react at all with Kawasaki strain. These results suggest that the Kawasaki strain may be different antigenically from the prototype strains and Shimokoshi strain. The finding two strains of the same antigenic type (Kawasaki) among only nine isolates suggests the presence of Kawasaki-type rickettsiae in Miyazaki Prefecture. Shimokoshi strain also did not react with these strain-specific monoclonal antibodies, suggesting that strains of R. tsutsugamushi antigenically distinct from the prototype strains, such as Kawasaki and Shimokoshi strains, may easily be recognized by their nonreactivity with these monoclonal antibodies.Rickettsia tsutsugamushi is unique among the Rickettsia spp. because of the presence of various antigenic variants. Gilliam, Karp, and Kato types are commonly isolated (4, 5) ; however other types were recognized by us (7) and other investigators (1). 611

To clarify the differences in susceptibility of six species in the Fagaceae (Quercus crispula, Quercus serrata, Quercus acutissima, Quercus phillyraeoides, Quercus glauca, and Castanopsis cuspidata var. sieboldii) to Raffaelea quercivora, we inoculated this fungus on seven potted 5-year-old seedlings of each species, observed symptom development, and measured xylem pressure potential (XPP) after inoculation. The first death was observed on the 11th day in Q. crispula and on the 56th day in Q. serrata. The number of dead seedlings of Q. crispula and Q. serrata were five and one, respectively, whereas no mortality was observed in the other four species. The XPP of inoculated seedlings in both Q. crispula and Q. serrata decreased after inoculation. In contrast, the XPP of inoculated seedlings of the other four species remained almost the same as in the control seedlings. These results indicate that R. quercivora is pathogenic to Q. crispula and Q. serrata and that the susceptibility of the six Fagaceae species in our study differed among species.