Salispina Marano, A.L. Jesus & Pires-Zottar., gen. nov.
Index Fungorum number: IF 551605, Facesoffungi number: FoF 01276
Etymology — salis (salt) indicating its presence under saline conditions (estuarine and marine habitats), and spina (spine) because of the common presence of spines on the zoosporangia.
Type species — Salispina intermedia A.L. Jesus, Pires-Zottar. &Marano
Holotypus — SP 466378

Colonies petaloid, with scanty aerial mycelium on agar culture media; mycelium well-developed, hyaline, tortuous and highly branched, non-septate to few septate, hyphae irregular. Zoosporangiophores undifferentiated from the vegetative hyphae, long, simple, bearing one terminal zoosporangium. Zoosporangia with vacuolated protoplasm, sphaerical, globose, obovate, obpyriform, or elongated, thick-walled, from smooth to with spines showing variable degree of coverage on the zoosporangia; basal-plug hyaline, slightly below the zoosporangia. Zoospore release takes place through the formation of a persistent, short to long, dehiscence tube; vesicle absent. Chlamydospores absent. Sexual reproduction unknown.

Notes — Salispina forms a well-defined lineage phylogenetically distant from the Halophytophthora s.s. clade (Figs. 1 and 2) and appears as closely related to Sapromyces elongatus (Fig. 1; Nakagiri 2002; Nakagiri and Izumi 2005; Beakes et al. 2014; Marano et al. 2014). Fatty acid profiles evidenced that most members of the Halophytophthora s.s. clade produce both arachidonic (ARA) and eicosapentaenoic (EPA) acids while Salispina spinosa (H. spinosa var. spinosa) seems to be able to produce only ARA (Pang et al. 2015). Fell andMaster (1975) observed that zoosporangial size and degree of spine coverage are nutritionally determined. Zoosporangia formed on a rich substrate are larger and completely covered with spines while those formed on poorer substrates are smaller and have only a few distal spines or are even smooth. The dehiscence tube appears to be hydrotropic, being its development conditioned by the presence of water (Fell and Master 1975).

Fig. 1 Phylogram generated from Bayesian inference analysis (MrBayes 3.2, Ronquist et al. 2012) based on SSU rDNA sequences showing the phylogenetic placement of Salispina gen. nov. in a well-defined clade (indicated in bold). Maximum likelihood (ML) bootstrap support values (PhyML 3.1, Guindon and Gascuel 2003) < 50 % are marked with (-). Clades that do not appear in the ML analysis are indicated with a zero. Bayesian posterior probability values > 0.50 are labelled numerically. Scale bar indicates the average number of substitutions per site. New taxa are in blue and ex-type strains are in bold.

Fig. 2 Phylogram generated from Bayesian inference analysis (MrBayes 3.2, Ronquist et al. 2012) based on cytochrome oxidase I (COI mtDNA) sequences showing the phylogenetic placement of Salispina gen. nov. in a well-defined clade (indicated in bold). Maximum likelihood (ML) bootstrap support values (PhyML 3.1, Guindon and Gascuel 2003) < 50 % are marked with (-). Clades that do not appear in the ML analysis are indicated with a zero. Bayesian posterior probability values > 0.60 are labelled numerically. Scale bar indicates the average number of substitutions per site. New taxa are in blue and extype strains in bold.