Multigene phylogeny and morphology of Alternaria reveal a novel species and a new record in China

Abstract

Two Alternaria species, A. carotiincultae and A. glehniae sp. nov. are isolated from necrotic leaf symptoms of Ligusticum chuanxiong Hort. and Glehnia littoralis Fr. Schmidt ex Miq in China, respectively. The two species are determined as distinct species belonging to sect. Radicina of Alternaria based on morphology and a multigene analysis of ITS, EF-1α, RPB2 and ATPase sequences. Alternaria glehniae is illustrated here as a novel species because the conidial size, septa and sporulation patterns are different from its closely related species. A. carotiincultae is also described as a new record in China.

Genetic Analysis and Pathogenic Characterization of Alternaria tenuissima Induced Fruit Rot of Bitter Gourd

“…Recent diagnosis techniques e.g., PCR is more reliable for pathogen detection (Khan et al 2018). The ribosomal genes and their ITS regions have been extensively used for distinguishing and naming of the species (Yang et al 2020), along with the study of genetic diversity (Ghosh et al 2019;Turzhanova et al 2020), phylogenetic relationship (Ozkilinc et al 2018;Liu et al 2019;Tao et al 2019), and taxonomic studies (Mahmoudi et al 2017;Poursafar et al 2018). In fungi, ITS region is used in species identification and phylogenetic studies of closely related species (Mmbaga et al 2011).…”

Morphological and molecular identification of two new Alternaria species (Ascomycota, Pleosporaceae) in section Radicina from China

“…Except for A. atrocariis, which had no published sequence data, the two other species were shown to belong to other sections: A. japonica felled in the section Japonicae and A. soliaridae formed a separate monophyletic lineage (Woudenberg et al 2013). Recently, two more species A. chlamydosporifera and A. glehniae were reported in the section Radicina (Marin-Felix et al 2019;Tao et al 2019).…”

“…Preliminary BLAST searches in GenBank with ITS and TEF1 sequences of the present isolates indicated that they had a close phylogenetic relationship with species from section Radicina of Alternaria. Subsequently, sequence data of 19 Alternaria species and Stemphylium herbarum CBS 191.86 (outgroup) were retrieved from National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), mostly published in Marin-Felix et al (2019), Woudenberg et al (2013), andTao et al (2019) (Table 1). The gene sequences were concatenated and edited manually according to ITS+TEF1+GAPDH+RPB2 for YZU 161234 and YZU 161235 and ITS+TEF1+RPB2 for YZU 151055 and YZU 151059 with equal weight in MEGA v.7.0.26 (Kumar et al 2016).…”

“…Obviously, the conidia of A. divaricatae was smaller than A. smyrnii (Table 2) and A. divaricatae could be also easily differentiated from A. chlamydosporifera by the lack of chlamydospores in culture (Marin-Felix et al 2019). Meanwhile, A. glehniae was distinguished from A. divaricatae by its single conidium on apex of conidiophore (there was no geniculate sporulation loci) and production of secondary conidium (Tao et al 2019). In addition, A. radicina and A. carotiincultae were distinguished from present species by distant phylogenetic relationship in section Radicina.…”

“…In recent studies, both morphological and molecular analyses were used for the delimitation of the genus Alternaria, which has been divided into 28 sections and eight monotypic lineages (Woudenberg et al 2013;Lawrence et al 2016;Ghafri et al 2019;Marin-Felix et al 2019). The number of Alternaria species has been continuously growing after re-descriptions and new discovery (Deng et al 2018;Ahmadpour 2019: Liu et al 2019Tao et al 2019;Bessadat et al 2020;He et al 2020). Coincidentally, several phylogenetic lineages have strongly supported morphology-based sections but others not (Simmons 2007;Woudenberg et al 2015).…”