Abstract
Curvularia is a cosmopolitan genus that includes species associated with plants, animals and humans, several of which are of clinical significance. Some of these species are important pathogens of grasses, causing devastating diseases on cereal crops in the family Poaceae. In the present multi-locus study, ex-type and reference strains of Curvularia, as well as several strains deposited in the CBS culture collection of the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, were included. Based on ITS, GAPDH and TEF1 sequences, as well as phenotypic data, ten new species are described and illustrated: C. arcana, C. austriaca, C. canadensis, C. ellisii, C. pseudoclavata, C. pseudoellisii, C. pseudointermedia, C. pseudoprotuberata, C. siddiquii and C. tribuli. Moreover, the new combinations C. cactivora and C. patereae are proposed, and an epitype for C. oryzae-sativae is designated. In addition, illustrations and descriptions are provided for C. cactivora, C. ellisii, C. crassiseptata, C. neergaardii, C. oryzae, C. oryzae-sativae, C. protuberata and C. verruciformis. The description of C. pseudobrachyspora is emended, and its host and distribution records are updated.
Highlights
Curvularia is a genus with a worldwide distribution that includes pathogens or saprobes of a wide range of plant hosts
Several studies based on the internal transcribed spacer regions and intervening 5.8S nrRNA gene (ITS), large subunit of the rDNA (LSU) and partial fragments of the glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) and the translation elongation factor 1-α (TEF1) genes have been performed, resulting in several species being transferred from one genus to another (Manamgoda et al 2012, 2014; Tan et al 2014)
The consensus tree obtained from the RAxML analysis of the combined dataset is shown in Fig. 1, which agreed with the topology of the Bayesian analysis
Summary
Curvularia is a genus with a worldwide distribution that includes pathogens or saprobes of a wide range of plant hosts. In Bipolaris, conidia are usually longer than in Curvularia (Sivanesan 1987; Marin-Felix et al 2017a) Both genera include species that exhibit intermediate conidial characters (Manamgoda et al 2012), making sequence data essential for proper species delimitation. The Drechslera asexual morph of Pyrenophora, as well as species of Exserohilum and Johnalcornia, is similar to Bipolaris and Curvularia (Tan et al 2014; Hernández-Restrepo et al 2018; Marin-Felix et al 2019). Because the sexual morph is rarely found in nature and difficult to induce in culture, it is of limited value to distinguish Bipolaris and Curvularia (Manamgoda et al 2014, 2015) Species of both Curvularia and Bipolaris are mainly differentiated based on their asexual morphs (Marin-Felix et al 2017a)
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