Dothiorella acacicola

Dothiorella acericola Phookamsak, Tennakoon & K.D. Hyde, in Phookamsak et al., Fungal Diversity: 10.1007/s13225-019-00421-w, [78] (2019)

Etymology: The specific epithet “acericola” refers to the host genus Acer, on which the holotype was collected

Holotype: KUN-HKAS 102213

Saprobic on dried twigs of Acer palmatum. Sexual morph Undetermined. 

Asexual morph Coelomycetous. Conidiomata 220–360 µm high, 190–310 µm diam., pycnidial, aggregated, clustered, semi-immersed to erumpent, dark brown to black, globose to subglobose, uni- to biloculate, ostiole central, with minute papilla. Conidiomata walls 15–40 µm wide, composed of several layers of broad to flattened, dark brown to black, pseudoparenchymatous cells of textura angularis to textura prismatica, with flattened, hyaline cells towards the inner layers. Conidiophores reduced to conidiogenous cells. Conidiogenous cells (7–)9–15(–24) × 3–6(–7) μm l/w.

Culture characteristics: Colonies on PDA reaching 70–73 mm diam. after 1 week at 20–30 °C; initially medium sparse to dense, circular, or slightly irregular in shape, surface smooth, with edge entire to lobate; from above, initially white, becoming white-grey to grey; from below, grey to pale yellowish; not producing pigmentation on agar medium.

Material examined: CHINA, Yunnan Province, Kunming, Panlong, Ciba, on dead hanging twigs of Acer palmatum Thunb. (Sapindaceae), 28 November 2015, R. Phookamsak, COE009 (KUN-HKAS 102213, holotype), ex-type living culture KUMCC 18-0137.

GenBank numbers: ITS = MK359449, TEF1-α = MK361182.

Notes: In the NCBI BLASTn search of ITS and TEF1-α sequences, Dothiorella acericola is most similar to D. viticola A.J.L. Phillips & J. Luque, with 99% and 98% similarities, respectively. Phylogenetic analyses of a combined ITS and TEF1-α sequence dataset show that D. acericola is sister to Spencermartinsia alpina Y. Zhang ter & Ming Zhang and distinct from D. viticola. Dothiorella acericola, Spencermartinsia alpina and S. yunnana Zhang ter & Ming Zhang were collected from Yunnan, China, but they are phylogenetically distant (Zhang et al. 2016). Dothiorella acericola has the same size range of conidia as Spencermartinsia alpina and S. yunnana (Zhang et al. 2016). A comparison of TEF1-α nucleotide bases shows that D. acericola differs from Spencermartinsia alpina and S. yunnana in 11/225 bp (4.9%) and 13/225 bp (5.8%), respectively. Therefore, we introduce a new species, D. acericola in this study based on the guidelines of Jeewon and Hyde (2016). Yang et al. (2017) treated Spencermartinsia as a synonym of Dothiorella. Spencermartinsia alpina and S. yunnana should perhaps be transferred to the genus Dothiorella.