Abstract
A novel fungal species, Aspergillus labruscus sp. nov., has been found in Brazil during an investigation of the fungal species present on the surface of grape berries (Vitis labrusca L.) for use in the production of concentrated grape juice. It seems to be associated to V. labrusca, and has never been recovered from Vitis vinifera. This new species belonging to Aspergillus subgenus Circumdati section Nigri is described here using morphological characters, extrolite profiling, partial sequence data from the BenA and CaM genes, and internal transcribed spacer sequences of ribosomal DNA. Phenotypic and molecular data enabled this novel species to be clearly distinguished from other black aspergilli. A. labruscus sp. nov. is uniseriate, has yellow mycelium, poor sporulation on CYA at 25 °C, abundant salmon to pink sclerotia and rough conidia. Neoxaline and secalonic acid D were consistently produced by isolates in this taxon. The type strain of A. labruscus sp. nov. is CCT 7800 (T) = ITAL 22.223 (T) = IBT 33586 (T).
Highlights
The production and commercialization of grape juice concentrate is growing every year in Brazil
It is very difficult to identify fungi belonging to Aspergillus section Nigri due to the subtle morphological differences between species, and DNA sequence information is increasingly being used for species identification and diagnosis
Fungi belonging to section Nigri have been identified mainly using CaM gene sequences, because the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) of the nuclear ribosomal, accepted as the official DNA barcode for fungi[12], is insufficient for correctly identifying all Aspergillus section Nigri species[11]
Summary
All CaM gene sequences were compared using the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) against the NCBI database to recognize fungal species that have similar DNA sequences. The majority of gene sequences were similar (sequence identity ≥99%) to one of the 27 species belonging to Aspergillus section Nigri, but the CaM gene sequences from 23 isolates were found to be significantly different from all other sequences of species described so far (NCBI accessed 20 Dez, 2016). Using the BLAST tool it was found that the CaM gene sequences from these isolates are most similar to those from Aspergillus homomorphus, but with only 85% of sequence identity. We generated a CaM-based phylogram of the 23 sequences not assigned to any described species using the BLAST tool, and those retrieved from GenBank for each Aspergillus section Nigri on Samson’s updated list. Using the BLAST tool with the “sequences from type material” (RefSeq) option (accessed 20 Jan, 2017), the ITS sequence from our novel isolates was found to be most
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