Plant-Associated Novel Didymellaceous Taxa in the South China Botanical Garden (Guangzhou, China)

Abstract

The South China Botanical Garden (SCBG), one of the largest and oldest botanical gardens in China, conserves important plant germplasms of endangered species. Therefore, ensuring tree health and studying the associated mycobiome of the phyllosphere is essential to maintaining its visual aesthetics. During a survey of plant-associated microfungal species in SCBG, we collected several coelomycetous taxa. Phylogenetic relationships were evaluated based on the analyses of ITS, LSU, RPB2, and β-tubulin loci. The morphological features of the new collections were compared with those of existing species, emphasizing close phylogenetic affinities. Based on the morphological comparisons and multi-locus phylogeny, we introduce three new species. These are Ectophoma phoenicis sp. nov., Remotididymella fici-microcarpae sp. nov., and Stagonosporopsis pedicularis-striatae sp. nov. In addition, we describe a new host record for Allophoma tropica in the Didymellaceae. Detailed descriptions and illustrations are provided along with notes comparing allied species.

New Species of Didymellaceae within Aquatic Plants from Southwestern China

“…In recent years, the vast majority of studies on the diversity of Didymellaceae have focused on the soil environment [23,25,36,78,81,82]. In contrast, the diversity of this family in freshwater ecosystems has received very little attention.…”

“…Stagonosporopsis is mainly regarded as a causal agent in different plants, such as gummy stem blight in pumpkins and ray blight in pyrethrum [92,93]. Typical characteristics of Stagonosporopsis species are their oblong to ellipsoid conidia, as well as the sub-globose conidiomata with slight papillate [82]. In addition, S. malaiana was identified and introduced as a new species belonging to this genus.…”

Palm Fungi and Their Key Role in Biodiversity Surveys: A Review

“…Many other occasional reports of palmicolous "anamorphs", including new genera and species, are continuously published, revealing the plethora of genera that make up the hyphomycetous and coelomycetous assemblage that inhabit palm tissues, e.g., refs. [268,279,310,[575][576][577][578] (Table 2). For example, Hongsanan et al [279] described the new genus and species Discopycnothyrium palmae on the branches of an unidentified palm from Thailand (Table 1).…”

Didymellaceae species associated with tea plant (Camellia sinensis) in China

“… Aveskamp et al (2010) divided the family into at least 18 different clusters according to the sequence data obtained from 324 strains, redefining Epicoccum , Peyronellaea and Stagonosporopsis and demonstrating that Ascochyta , Phoma and Didymella were highly polyphyletic. As an extremely species-rich family, more than 5400 species belonging to 44 accepted genera have been recorded in Didymellaceae ( Kularathnage et al 2023 ).…”

“…In addition, 40 new species were identified combining phylogenetic analyses, based on concatenated DNA sequence dataset (ITS, LSU, RPB2 and TUB2 ) and morphological examination ( Hou et al 2020b ). Given the above, phylogenetic analyses, based on a combined ITS-LSU- RPB2 - TUB2 DNA sequence dataset, have been demonstrated as an effective method for the identification of Didymellaceae at species level ( Hou et al 2020a ; Yuan et al 2021 ; Kularathnage et al 2023 ; Yang et al 2023a ).…”