Jinshana tangtangiae K.L. Pang, M.W.L. Chiang & E.B.G. Jones, sp. nov.

Index Fungorum number: IF 902397; Mycobank number: MB 902397; Facesoffungi number: FoF 14036; Fig. 1

Holotype – F0036020

Etymology – To honour my Thai boxing coach Ya-Wen Tang (nick name ‘Tang Tang’), who has been helping me to get back to a healthy lifestyle.

Saprobic on trapped wood on a rocky shore. Sexual morph: Ascomata 181–245 μm high, 181–266 μm diam. (x̅=213×226 μm, n=5), superficial, globose to subglobose, solitary to gregarious, coriaceous, yellow to brown, ostiolate, papillate (Fig. 1a, c). Necks short, 53–117 μm long, 32–64 μm diam. (x̅=77×48 μm, n=4), cylindrical, yellow to brown (Fig. 1b). Periphyses not observed. Peridium 21–53 μm (x̅=34 μm, n=12), comprising an outer stratum (5–8 layers) of hyaline cells of textura angularis with large lumina and an inner stratum (3–4 layers) of hyaline and elongated cells (Fig. 1a, b). Catenophyses present (Fig. 1e). Asci 105–142 × 19–28 μm (x̅= 121 × 24 μm, n = 12), 8-spored, unitunicate, thin-walled, clavate with a flattened apex, pedunculate (Fig. 1d). Ascospores 21–28×10–11 μm (x̅=25×μm, n=10), ellipsoidal, 1-septate, with one large oil globule in each cell, not constricted at the septum, thickwalled, hyaline, appendaged (Fig. 1f–h). Appendages bipolar, initially adpressed to the ascospore wall, unravelling in sea water to form a long thin filament (Fig. 1i). Asexual morph: Not observed.

Material examined – Jin-Shan (New Taipei City), on a piece of unidentified trapped wood, 1 June 2022, S.Y. Guo and K.L. Pang, (F0036020, holotype), deposited at National Museum of Natural Science (Taipei) as dried wood.

GenBank number – OQ418018 (18S rDNA), OQ418019 (28S rDNA), OQ469752 (ITS rDNA).

Notes – Jinshana tangtangiae did not grow in culture after multiple isolation attempts, and the partial 18S and 28S rDNA sequences were obtained from PCR amplifications of genomic DNA extracted from spores by boiling for 10 min. Jinshana tangtangiae did not group with the genera with unfurling ascospore appendages and grouped with Qarounispora grandiappendiculata with 100% ML, 92% MP bootstrap supports and 1.00 BYPP values (Fig. 2). Morphologically, J. tangtangiae is similar to Q. grandiappendiculata in the colour and shape of the ascomata but differs from it in having a clavate asci with a flattened apex, and the presence of bipolar ascospore appendages which unravel in seawater. Qarounispora grandiappendiculata has broad clavate asci without an apical apparatus and broadly ellipsoidal ascospores with a unipolar appendage which swells in water to form an irregular amorphous structure (Nourel-Din et al. 2022). Jinshana tangtangiae is most similar morphologically to Aniptodera aquadulcis, which has immersed/superficial ascomata, asci with an apical pore, plasmalemma retracted below the apex and bigger ascospores (Hsieh et al. 1995). Therefore, a new genus and a new species are described for this marine fungus.

Figure 1 – Jinshana tangtangiae (holotype). a Parafilm section of ascoma showing asci developing at the base of venter. b Aperiphysate neck and peridium made of two strata of cells. c Light-coloured ascomata on wood. d Eight-spored asci with a flat apex. e Catenophyses made up of irregularly shaped cells. f–h Hyaline ascospores with bipolar, pad-like appendages which unfurl into a thread in seawater. i Long, thread-like appendage

Figure 2 – A maximum likelihood tree based on a combined analysis of the 18S and 28S rDNA. The numbers at the nodes represent maximum likelihood bootstrap (ML), maximum parsimony (MP) bootstrap and posterior probability (BYPP). The ML analysis was performed in IQ-TREE web server (Trifinopoulos et al. 2016) with the following settings: Tamura 3-parameter model (Tamura 1992), gamma distributed with invariant sites (G+I), #rate categories set at 4. The ML branch support analysis was performed with ultrafast bootstrap (UFBoot) (Hoang et al. 2018) with the following settings: number of bootstrap alignments set at 1000, maximum iteration set at 1000, minimum correlation coefficient set at 0.99, 1000 replicates of SH-aLRT branch test. The MP bootstrap analysis was performed in MEGA11 (Tamura et al. 2021) with the following settings: TreeBisection-Regrafting algorithm with search level 1, initial trees through random addition of sequences (5 replicates), 1000 replicates (Felsenstein 1985). The PP was obtained through Bayesian analysis in BEAST v1.10.4 (Suchard et al. 2018) with the following settings: TN93, estimated base frequency, gamma+invariant sites, number of gamma categories set at 5, a strict clock, Coalescent: Constant Size as the speciation model, running 20 million generations with parameters and trees sampled every 1000 generations