Morphological and molecular characterization of Fusarium oxysporum and Fusarium avenaceum causing a novel needle blight of Picea asperata in China

Abstract

Picea asperata is an important native Chinese tree because of its economic and ecological values. As the wood texture of P. asperata is dense, detailed and elastic, the good wood can be used as building, furniture and musical instrument material (Dinulic et al., 2021;Keskin & Atar, 2011;Schuetze, 2018), and it has been reported that P. asperata has great value in paper making (Joelsson et al., 2020). P. asperata is widely used for ornamental and urban greening because of the beautiful figure and evergreen (Kul'kova et al., 2018). In addition, as one of the most important afforestation tree species in western China, it plays an important role in water conservation, soil conservation and ecosystems formation and maintenance in forest areas (Xiong et al., 2019; Yue et al., 2018). However, some pathogens have caused serious diseases in spruce and reduced the economic and ecological value of spruce. A recent report by Stępniewska et al. (2020) showed that Calonectria montana causes damping-off disease in spruce seedlings. An investigation by Swedjemark and Stenlid (1993) indicated that Heterobasidion annosum induced root rot of spruce. Wang et al. (2022) demonstrated that rust fungus Chrysomyxa unger (Coleosporiaceae, Pucciniales) is capable of causing spruce needle and cone rust, especially in spruce plantations and natural forests in northwestern and southwestern China, where needle disease has led to great economic losses. Needle blight