Abstract:
Lichenicolous fungi are parasites of lichens. Many of these fungi are referred to as
“black fungi”. A diversity of these black fungi include species that are pathogenic
to humans and plants. A majority of black fungi reside in the phylum Ascomycota
within the sub-classes Chaetothyriomycetidae and Dothideomycetidae. To
explore the diversity of lichenicolous “black fungi” associated with lichens in
China, we conducted several field surveys in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous
Region and Yunnan Province between 2019 and 2020. We recovered 1,587 fungal
isolates from the lichens collected during these surveys. During the preliminary
identification of these isolates using the complete internal transcribed spacer (ITS),
partial large subunit of nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (LSU), and small subunit of
nuclear ribosomal RNA gene (SSU), we identified 15 fungal isolates from the genus
Cladophialophora. However, these isolates had low sequence similarities with all
known species from the genus. Therefore, we amplified additional gene regions,
such as, translation elongation factor (TEF) and partial β-tubulin gene (TUB),
and constructed a multi-gene phylogeny using maximum likelihood, maximum
parsimony, and Bayesian inference. In our datasets, we included type sequences
where available for all Cladophialophora species. Phylogenetic analyses revealed
that none of the 15 isolates belonged to any of the previously described species in
the genus. Therefore, using both morphological and molecular data, we classified
these 15 isolates as nine new species within the genus Cladophialophora: C.
flavoparmeliae, C. guttulate, C. heterodermiae, C. holosericea, C. lichenis, C.
moniliformis, C. mongoliae, C. olivacea, and C. yunnanensis. The outcome from
this study shows that lichens are an important refugia for black lichenicolous
fungi, such as those from Chaetothyriales.
