Taxonomy and phylogeny of Cercospora spp. from Northern Thailand

Abstract

The genus Cercospora represents a group of important plant pathogenic fungi with a wide geographic distribution, being commonly associated with leaf spots on a broad range of plant hosts. The goal of the present study was to conduct a morphological and molecular phylogenetic analysis of the Cercospora spp. occurring on various plants growing in Northern Thailand, an area with a tropical savannah climate, and a rich diversity of vascular plants. Sixty Cercospora isolates were collected from 29 host species (representing 16 plant families). Partial nucleotide sequence data for two gene loci (ITS and cmdA), were generated for all isolates. Results from this study indicate that members of the genus Cercospora vary regarding host specificity, with some taxa having wide host ranges, and others being host-specific. Based on cultural, morphological and phylogenetic data, four new species of Cercospora could be identified: C. glycinicola (from Glycine max), C. cyperacearum and C. cyperina (from Cyperus alternifolius), and C. musigena (from Musa sp.). The most common Cercospora sp. found in Northern Thailand was C. cf. malloti, which occurred on a wide host range. Several collections could not be resolved to species level due to the lack of reference cultures and DNA data for morphologically similar species. Further collections from other countries are needed to help resolve the taxonomy of some species complexes occurring on various plant hosts in Thailand.

Cercosporoid fungi (Mycosphaerellaceae) 4. Species on dicots (Acanthaceae to Amaranthaceae)

“…Notes : Nguanhom et al . (2015) examined Cercospora species from northern Thailand by means of molecular methods.…”

Novel fungi from an ancient niche: cercosporoid and related sexual morphs on ferns

“…With DNA sequencing becoming widely available for use by mycologists as a reliable source of information ( Taylor et al 2000 ), a more concrete classification of fungi was initiated, and several studies have since been published on cercosporoid fungi ( Arzanlou et al 2007 , Crous et al 2007a , 2009b , d , 2013a , Braun et al 2013 , Groenewald et al 2013 , Bakhshi et al 2014 , 2015 , Nguanhom et al 2015 ). These studies have shown that some morphology-based genera were largely monophyletic, e.g.…”

IMA Genome - F13

“…An NCBI BLASTn search for ITS sequence similarity was done with the type database of NCBI (Altschul et al 1990 ). Based on the closest similarity of the BLASTn search, the ITS region sequences of ex-type and authentic strains, sequences from Groenewald et al ( 2013 ), and Nguanhom et al ( 2015 ) were retrieved from GenBank. Alignment of sequences was done using Clustal W of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA) software v 7.0 (Kumar et al 2016 ).…”