Neopestalotiopsis siciliana sp. nov. and N. rosae Causing Stem Lesion and Dieback on Avocado Plants in Italy

Abstract

Avocado (Persea americana) represents an important emerging tropical crop in Italy, especially in the southern regions. In this study, young plants of avocado showing symptoms of stem and wood lesion, and dieback, were investigated. Isolations from symptomatic tissues consistently yielded colonies of Neopestalotiopsis-like species. The characterization of representative isolates was based on the observation of morphological characters, the effect of temperature on mycelial growth rate, and on the sequencing of three different gene regions, specifically ITS, TEF1, and TUB2. Phylogenetic analyses were conducted based on maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood approaches. The results showed the presence of two species, viz. Neopestalotiopsis rosae and N. siciliana, the latter of which is here described as a new species. Pathogenicity tests were conducted using the mycelial plug technique on young potted avocado trees for both Neopestalotiopsis species. The results showed that both species were pathogenic to avocado. This study represents the first report of these two species affecting avocado and results in the description of a new species within the genus Neopestalotiopsis. Based on phylogeny, Pestalotiopsis coffeae-arabicae is combined in Neopestalotiopsis.

Pestalotioid Species Associated with Medicinal Plants in Southwest China and Thailand

“…After that, the number of species in Neopestalotiopsis increased from 24 to 73, and the number of species in Pseudopestalotiopsis increased from 3 to 23 ( http://www.indexfungorum.org/ , 10 Nov 2022). In recent years, there have been more reports on diseases caused by Neopestalotiopsis ; for example, N. vitis caused grapevine leaf spots in China, N. rosicola caused stem canker of Rosa chinensis in China, N. clavispora caused leaf spots and fruit rot of strawberry in India, N. maddoxii caused flower diseases of Macadamia integrifolia in Australia, N. eucalyptorum was associated with disease of Eucalyptus plants in Portugal, and N. siciliana caused stem lesion and dieback on avocado plants in Italy ( 22 , 23 , 26 , 29 , 30 , 63 ). However, only six Pseudopestalotiopsis species were reported as plant pathogens ( 47 , 64 – 67 ).…”

“…The sequences were compared against the NCBI GenBank nucleotide database using BLASTn to evaluate the closest phylogenetic matches. All sequences used in this study were downloaded from GenBank referring to previous studies ( 16 , 23 , 27 , 30 , 44 , 65 , 67 , 76 – 79 ) ( Table 3 ). The single-gene sequences were checked with BioEdit v. 7.0.9.0 ( 80 ).…”

“…As important plant pathogens, pestalotioid species are almost ubiquitous in agricultural and noncultivated ecosystems, causing multiple diseases and huge economic losses ( 22 – 30 ). For example, gray blight disease of tea plants is caused by Pseudopestalotiopsis spp.…”

Hidden diversity of Pestalotiopsis and Neopestalotiopsis (Amphisphaeriales, Sporocadaceae) species allied with the stromata of entomopathogenic fungi in Taiwan

“…Newly-generated sequence data in this study were observed and manually adjusted via BioEdit version 7.2.5 ( Hall et al 2011 ; http://bioedit.software.informer.com/ ) to check the quality of the sequences. Additional related sequences of pestalotiopsis-like fungi were downloaded from GenBank ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore ) based on recent publications ( Solarte et al 2018 ; Fiorenza et al 2022 ; Jiang et al 2022a , 2022b ; Peng et al 2022 ; Tian et al 2022 ; Xiong et al 2022 ; Zhang et al 2022 ; Guterres et al 2023 ; Sun et al 2023 ) and are listed in Suppl. material 1 : tables S2, S3.…”

Neopestalotiopsis guajavicola sp. nov. causing a new leaf spot on Psidium guajava in Pakistan

“…The isolate was further identified by a phylogenetic tree with sequences of ITS (MH209245), TEF 1-α (MH460870), LSU (MH478108), TUB (MH460873) genes/regions. The analysis delineated it as Neopestalotiopsis guajavicola (Haq et al, 2021;Fiorenza et al, 2022). The pathogenicity test was conducted on twoyear-old P. guajava healthy plants, grown in earthen pots under natural conditions.…”