Abstract
Coelomycetous fungi are ubiquitous in soil, sewage, and sea- and freshwater environments. However, freshwater coelomycetous fungi have been very rarely reported in the literature. Knowledge of coelomycetous fungi in freshwater habitats in Spain is poor. The incubation of plant debris, from freshwater in various places in Spain into wet chambers, allowed us to detect and isolate in pure culture several pycnidia-producing fungi. Fungal strains were phenotypically characterized, and a phylogenetic study was carried out based on the analysis of concatenated nucleotide sequences of the D1–D2 domains of the 28S nrRNA gene (LSU), the internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) of the nrDNA, and fragments of the RNA polymerase II subunit 2 (rpb2) and beta tubulin (tub2) genes. As a result of these, we report the finding of two novel species of Neocucurbitaria, three of Neopyrenochaeta, and one of Pyrenochaetopsis. Based on the phylogenetic study, we also transferred Neocucurbitaria prunicola to the genus Allocucurbitaria. This work makes an important contribution to the knowledge of the mycobiota of plant debris in freshwater habitats.
Highlights
Coelomycetous fungi are characterized by the production of conidia within a cavity lined by fungal or fungal-host tissue called conidiomata [1]
The final concatenated dataset obtained with both maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian Inference (BI) analyses contained 71 in-groups of strains with a total of 2252 characters including gaps (455 for internal transcribed spacer region (ITS), 791 for LSU, 272 for tub2, and 734 for rpb2), of which 704 are parsimony informative (170 for ITS, 69 for LSU, 143 for tub2, and 322 for rpb2)
We have isolated several coelomycetous fungi from submerged plant debris collected in different freshwater habitats in Spain by incubation of the samples in wet chambers
Summary
Coelomycetous fungi are characterized by the production of conidia within a cavity lined by fungal or fungal-host tissue called conidiomata [1]. Coelomycetous fungi are mostly parasites of terrestrial vascular plants but are saprobic, growing at the expense of dead organic matter on the ground, especially on plant debris. These are ubiquitous on soil, sewage, and in salt- and freshwater environments. Freshwater coelomycetous fungi occur on stream-side plants or on submerged wood litter, and their conidia can be recovered from foam and water samples [3] They produce brown to blackish pycnidial fruiting bodies on submerged woody debris and stems of herbaceous plants, and produce several conidia from the conidiogenous cells [4]. Up to 2014, only 16 coelomycetous fungi had been reported from freshwater habitats [4,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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