Morphological and phylogenetic analyses reveal three new species of Apiospora in China

Abstract

Species of Apiospora are distributed worldwide as endophytes, pathogens and saprobes. In this study, we analysed Apiospora strains isolated from diseased leaves in Yunnan Province and dead culms in Shaanxi Province, China and we identified fungal species based on multi-locus phylogeny of ITS, LSU, tef1 and tub2 genes, along with the morphological characters, host and ecological distribution. Analyses revealed three new species, namely A. corylisp. nov., A. lophatherisp. nov. and A. oenotheraesp. nov. and one known species A. arundinis. Illustrations and descriptions of the four taxa are provided, along with comparisons with closely-related taxa in the genus.

Three new endophytic Apiospora species (Apiosporaceae, Amphisphaeriales) from China

“…Within the family Apiosporaceae, Apiospora is closely related to Arthrinium and they were once considered as two life stages of a single taxon (Ellis 1965;Crous and Groenewald 2013;Réblová et al 2016;Jiang et al 2019). Morphologically, Apiospora and Arthrinium lack clear diagnostic features, although species of Arthrinium often produce conidia of various shapes (Minter and Cannon 2018;Pintos and Alvarado 2021), while most species of Apiospora have rounded lenticular conidia (Li et al 2023;Liao et al 2023). Ecologically, most sequenced collections of Arthrinium were found on Cyperaceae or Juncaceae in temperate, cold, or alpine habitats, while those of Apiospora were mainly collected on Poaceae, as well as various other plant host families, in a wide range of habitats, including tropical and subtropical regions (Dai et al 2016; Wang et al 2018;Feng et al 2021;Tian et al 2021;Kwon et al 2022;Monkai et al 2022).…”