Valsaceae Tul. & C. Tul.
The family Valsaceae Tul. & C. Tul. was introduced by Tulasne and Tulasne (1861) and placed in Diaporthales by Barr (1978). Most of Valsaceae species are plant pathogens causing canker and dieback disease, with damage to several economic crops worldwide (Adams et al. 2005; Fan et al. 2014a, b, 2015a, b; Ariyawansa et al. 2015b). Valsaceae was restricted to Cytospora Ehrenb. (asexual morph), Valsa Fr., Leucostoma (Nitschke) Höhn., Valsella Fuckel, and Valseutypella Höhn.; sexual morph for the last four genera (Fries 1823; Saccardo 1884; Gvritishvili 1982; Spielman 1985; Adams et al. 2005, 2006; Castlebury et al. 2002; Bulgakov 2010; Yang et al. 2015a). However, all sexual genera were synonymized under Valsa as a subgenus or species without additional infrageneric rank (Adams et al. 2005). According to the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants (ICN) in 2011, a single name is needed for a biological species and for genera, the older and more commonly encountered genus Cytospora (1818) was chosen over that of its sexual morph, Valsa (1849), for placement on the list of protected fungi (Adams et al. 2005; Fotouhifar et al. 2010; Fan et al. 2015a; Wingfield et al. 2012; Crous et al. 2015e; McNeill et al. 2012; Rossman et al. 2015). Cytospora is characterized by single or labyrinthine locules, filamentous conidiophores (or clavate to elongate obovoid asci), and allantoid, hyaline conidia (Spielman 1983, 1985; Adams et al. 2005). In moist conditions, conidia emerge from the fruiting bodies as yellow masses, and become orange to red gelatinous tendrils later (Adams et al. 2005, 2006). The genus Cytospora comprised 110 species (Kirk et al. 2008), however, 572 epithets are recorded in Index Fungorum (2015). Ex-type sequence data, is however, available for a few species. Thus it is difficult to identify species (Liu et al. 2015; Ariyawansa et al. 2015b). A systematic account of the genus Cytospora is needed to clarify cryptic species in Cytospora (Adams et al. 2002; Fotouhifar et al. 2010; Hyde et al. 2010, 2014; Fan et al. 2015a, b; Liu et al. 2015; Ariyawansa et al. 2015b; Yang et al. 2015b). The phylogenetic trees for Cytospora are presented in Figs. 1 and 2.
Fig. 1 Maximum Parsimony (MP) majority rule consensus tree for the analyzed Cytospora isolates based on a combined dataset of ACT, ITS and LSU sequence data.MP bootstrap support values higher than 50 % and Bayesian posterior probabilities (PP) above 95 % (MP/PP). The tree is rooted with Diaporthe vaccinii (CBS 160.32). The strain numbers are mentioned after the species names. The species obtained in this study is in blue bold and extype strains in black bold.
Fig. 2 Phylogenetic tree based on an alignment of the sequences of the ITS sequence data for Cytospora, Leucostoma, and Valsa species, which was generated using the MP and Bayesian posterior probabilities (PP) in PAUP. Numbers separated by a slash represent MP bootstrap values >50 % and Bayesian posterior probabilities (PP) above 95 % are given at the nodes (MP/PP). The tree is rooted in outgroup taxon Diaporthe vaccinii (CBS 160.32). New strains are in blue bold and ex-type strains are in black bold.
Genus