Parasympodiella lauri Hern.-Restr., Gené & Guarro, Stud. Mycol. 86, 87 (2017)

Index Fungorum number: IF820299; MycoBank number: MB820299; Facesoffungi number: FoF16107

Saprobic on submerged decaying wood. Asexual morph: Colonies superficial, effuse, scattered or gathered, hairy, with white flocculent conidia on the apex of conidiophores. Mycelium immersed in the natural substratum, composed of brown, smooth hyphae. Conidiophores 70–150 (–290) × 6.1–8.8 µm (x̅ = 149.5 × 7.3 µm, n = 10), macronematous, mononematous, erect, unbranched, septate, straight or slightly flexuous, sometimes obviously flexuous at the base, subcylindrical, sterile part with slightly thickened walls, brown, fertile part with thinner walls, pale brown, becoming paler toward the apex. Conidiogenous cells 13–27 × 5.4–8.8 µm (x̅ = 20.9 × 7.2 µm, n = 10), holothallic, terminal, integrated, smooth, pale brown, becoming hyaline toward the apex. Conidia 42–56 × 6–9 µm (x̅ = 48.1 × 8 µm, n = 30), thallic-arthric, dry, smooth, catenate, uniseptate or aseptate, cylindrical, both ends of intercalary conidia truncate, with a septal plug at each end, apically conidia with obtuse or rounded apical, hyaline, smooth, thin-walled. Sexual morph: Undetermined.

Culture characteristics – Conidia germinating on PDA within 12 h, and germ tubes produced from the end. Colonies on PDA reaching 50 mm diameter after 2 weeks of incubation at room temperature. Mycelium loose, dark green, colonies immersed of PDA, with flat surface, irregular edges, white spots are distributed among them. Reverse dark green.

Material examined – China, Yunnan Province, Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Bamei Town, on submerged decaying wood, 7 February 2022, W.P. Wang, S-3254 (HKAS 130438).

Notes – Current phylogenetic analysis showed that our new collection clustered with the ex-type strain of Parasympodiella lauri (FMR 13132) with 99% ML/0.99 PP support (Fig. 2). Morphologically, our collection resembles P. lauri in having unbranched conidiophores, proliferating sympodially conidiogenous cells, and thallic-arthric, catenate, cylindrical conidia. Thus, we identified our new collection as P. lauri, a species that has been reported from Spain and is associated with fallen leaves of Laurus sp. (Hernández-Restrepo et al. 2017), and it is the first time to report in China.

Figure 1 – Parasympodiella lauri (HKAS 130438). a Colonies on the substratum. b–f Conidiophores, Conidiophores with conidia. g–j Conidia. k Germinating conidium. l, m Colonies on PDA from surface and reverse. Scale bars: b, c, h = 25 µm, d–g = 50 µm, i–k = 10 µm.

Figure 2 – RAxML tree based on analysis of Parasympodiella that combined LSU and ITS dataset. The combined analyses include 14 strains with 1404 characters including gaps (LSU: 868 bp and ITS: 536 bp). Bootstrap support values for maximum likelihood (ML) greater than 75% and Bayesian posterior probabilities greater than 0.95 are indicated above branches as ML/PP. The tree is rooted with Scortechinia diminuspora (HUEFS 194245, SMH4763). The new collection is indicated in red. Ex-type strains are indicated with “T” after the strain number