Morpho-Phylogenetic Evidence Reveals Novel Species and New Records of Botryosphaeriaceae in China and Thailand

Abstract

Species in the Botryosphaeriaceae are common plant pathogens, endophytes, and saprobes found on a variety of mainly woody hosts. Botryosphaeriaceae is a high-profile fungal family whose genera have been subjected to continuous revisions in recent years. Surveys conducted during 2019 and 2020 on several decaying woody hosts (from dead arial twigs, branches, stems, bark, and seed pods) in China and Thailand revealed a high diversity of Botryosphaeriaceae fungi. Identification of 16 Botryosphaeriaceae isolates was carried out based on both morphological characteristics and phylogenetic analyses of combined ITS, LSU, tef1-α, and tub2 sequence data. Four novel species (Dothiorella ovata, Do. rosacearum, Do. septata, and Lasiodiplodia delonicis) and seven previously known species (Botryosphaeria fujianensis, Diplodia mutila, Di. seriata, L. crassispora, L. mahajangana, Macrophomina euphorbiicola and Sphaeropsis eucalypticola) were identified while new hosts and geographical records were reported. This study indicates that the fungal family Botryosphaeriaceae seems to be common and widespread on a broad range of hosts in China and Thailand.

Supplementary material 2 from: Wu Y, Peng C, Yuan R, Zhang M, Hu Y, Tian C (2024) New species and records of Botryosphaeriales (Dothideomycetes) associated with tree dieback in Beijing, China. MycoKeys 106: 225-250. https://doi.org/10.3897/mycokeys.106.122890

“…In recent years, many new species of Dothiorella have been published with conidial morphology similar to Do. hortiarborum Lin et al 2023a;Wu et al 2023). These suggest that the morphological characteristics of Dothiorella are not always stable.…”

“…The sequences obtained were assembled using SeqMan v. 7.1.0 software, and reference sequences from related publications (Phillips et al 2019;Lin et al 2023a;Wu et al 2023) were retrieved from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).…”