Damm et al.stimulated by strawberry plant extracts, especially flower extracts(Leandro et al. 2003). Acc<strong>or</strong>ding to Buddie et al. (1999) secondaryconidia may be produced directly from germinating primary conidia,and are smaller and m<strong>or</strong>e variable in shape, thus obscuringdifferences between taxa. Additionally, C. acutatum f<strong>or</strong>ms simplepigmented appress<strong>or</strong>ia, but few <strong>or</strong> no setae (Simmonds 1965).Guerber & C<strong>or</strong>rell (1997, 2001) described Glomerella acutata,the sexual m<strong>or</strong>ph of C. acutatum, as the product of matingexperiments, while some related <strong>species</strong> are homothallic, includingGa. acutata var. fi<strong>or</strong>iniae (Marcelino et al. 2008), later regarded asa separate <strong>species</strong> (C. fi<strong>or</strong>iniae, Shivas & Tan 2009) and an isolateof a Glomerella <strong>species</strong> related to C. acutata from Acer platanoidesin the USA (LoBuglio & Pfister 2008). Talgø et al. (2007) observedthe sexual m<strong>or</strong>ph Ga. acutata on naturally infected fruits ofhighbush blueberry in N<strong>or</strong>way. Numerous studies have shownthat C. acutatum is m<strong>or</strong>phologically and phylogenetically diverse(Sreenivasaprasad et al. 1994, Johnston & Jones 1997, Lardneret al. 1999, Freeman et al. 2001a, Nirenberg et al. 2002, Talhinhaset al. 2002, Guerber et al. 2003, Lubbe et al. 2004, Du et al. 2005,Peres et al. 2005, Sreenivasaprasad & Talhinhas 2005, Talhinhaset al. 2005, Johnston et al. 2008). Sreenivasaprasad et al. (1996)were the first to recognise that C. acutatum was unusually diverse,with strains showing divergence of 5.8 % in ITS-1 sequencecompared with levels of 2–4 % frequently found within otherfungal <strong>species</strong>, and they suggested splitting C. acutatum into two<strong>species</strong>. Johnston & Jones (1997) recognised four m<strong>or</strong>phologicalgroups, C. acutatum A–C and Glomerella miyabeana. Three ofthese groups were supp<strong>or</strong>ted by 28S nuclear ribosomal largesubunit rRNA (LSU) sequence data. Lardner et al. (1999), using acombination of RAPDs and m<strong>or</strong>phological/cultural data, identifiedseven sub<strong>or</strong>dinate groups within C. acutatum. Sequences of a200-bp intron of the glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase(GAPDH) and a 900-bp intron of the glutamine synthetase GSdistinguished seven main clades and several subclades withinstrains that <strong>or</strong>iginated mainly from N<strong>or</strong>th America and New Zealand(Guerber et al. 2003). The recognition of infraspecific groupswas m<strong>or</strong>e firmly established by Sreenivasaprasad & Talhinhas(2005), who distinguished clades A1 to A8 based on rDNA ITS andbeta-tubulin DNA (TUB2) sequences. These clades were mostlyc<strong>or</strong>related with the groups that had been distinguished previously.Whitelaw-Weckert et al. (2007) recognised an additional group A9.At this point, it was widely presumed that C. acutatum wasa <strong>species</strong> <strong>complex</strong> containing a number of constituent taxa, butthere was substantial reluctance to recognise the clades involvedas independent <strong>species</strong>. This was due to the lack of differentialm<strong>or</strong>phological and cultural characters. F<strong>or</strong> example, C. lupini wasnot recognised as f<strong>or</strong>mally separate from C. acutatum by Talhinhaset al. (2002) <strong>or</strong> by Sreenivasaprasad & Talhinhas (2005). Therewere some attempts to address these concerns via adoption off<strong>or</strong>mae speciales e.g. C. acutatum f. sp. pineum (Dingley & Gilmour1972), C. acutatum f. sp. hakeae (Lubbe et al. 2004) and C.acutatum f. sp. fi<strong>or</strong>iniae (Marcelino et al. 2008), but this mechanismf<strong>or</strong> recognition of pathology-related taxa is now rarely used.Gradually, separate <strong>species</strong> were recognised <strong>or</strong> accepted aspart of the C. acutatum <strong>species</strong> <strong>complex</strong>, e.g. C. lupini (Nirenberget al. 2002) and C. ph<strong>or</strong>mii (Farr et al. 2006). In a study using twogenes, ITS and TUB2, combined with m<strong>or</strong>phological data, Shivas& Tan (2009) recognised three distinct groups within C. acutatumstrains from Australia and accepted two new <strong>species</strong>, C. simmondsiiand C. fi<strong>or</strong>iniae (f<strong>or</strong>merly C. acutatum f. sp. fi<strong>or</strong>iniae) f<strong>or</strong> groups A2and A3. Recently, a new <strong>species</strong> was described f<strong>or</strong> group A4, C.clavatum (Faedda et al. 2011).Our research aims to present a comprehensive revision ofthe C. acutatum <strong>species</strong> <strong>complex</strong>. We th<strong>or</strong>oughly survey theconstituent taxa and delineate additional <strong>species</strong> where needed.We have examined a large number of C. acutatum s. lat. strains,isolated from various hosts and in various geographic areas. Multilocusmolecular analysis is the basis of <strong>species</strong> recognition, butm<strong>or</strong>phological and cultural characters allowing alternative meansof <strong>species</strong> recognition are given where possible.MATERIALS AND METHODSIsolatesA total of 331 strains have been studied, mostly previouslyidentified as C. acutatum, as well as other related strains from the<strong>CBS</strong>, IMI and other culture collections. Type material (holotypesand epitypes) of the <strong>species</strong> studied are located in the Herbariumof the Centraalbureau vo<strong>or</strong> Schimmelcultures (<strong>CBS</strong>), Utrecht,The Netherlands, in the IMI Fungarium, which is based in theRoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew (IMI and K(M)), UK, US NationalFungus Collections (BPI), Beltsville, Maryland, USA, the BotanicGarden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, Freie UniversitätBerlin (B), Germany and in the dried collection of the BotanischeStaatssammlung München (M), Germany. All descriptions are basedon the ex-type, ex-epitype <strong>or</strong> ex-neotype culture as appropriate.Features of other strains are added if deviant. Subcultures of thetypes, epitypes and neotypes, respectively, as well as all otherisolates used f<strong>or</strong> m<strong>or</strong>phological and sequence analyses aremaintained in the culture collections of <strong>CBS</strong> and IMI (Table 1).M<strong>or</strong>phological analysisTo enhance sp<strong>or</strong>ulation, autoclaved filter paper and doubleautoclavedstems of Anthriscus sylvestris were placed onto thesurface of synthetic nutrient-po<strong>or</strong> agar medium (SNA; Nirenberg1976). SNA and oatmeal agar (OA; Crous et al. 2009) cultures wereincubated at 20 °C under near UV light with 12 h photoperiod f<strong>or</strong>10 d. Measurements and photographs of characteristic structureswere made acc<strong>or</strong>ding to Damm et al. (2007). Appress<strong>or</strong>ia onhyphae were observed on the reverse side of SNA plates.Microscopic preparations were made in clear lactic acid, with 30measurements per structure and observed with a Nikon SMZ1000dissecting microscope (DM) <strong>or</strong> with a Nikon Eclipse 80i microscopeusing differential interference contrast (DIC) illumination. In the C.acutatum <strong>species</strong> <strong>complex</strong>, conidia are usually f<strong>or</strong>med in acervularconidiomata and additionally in the aerial mycelium. Unlessmentioned otherwise, only conidia from conidiomata were used inthis study f<strong>or</strong> m<strong>or</strong>phological examination.Colony characters and pigment production on SNA andOA cultures incubated at 20 °C under near UV light with 12 hphotoperiod were noted after 10 d. Colony colours were ratedacc<strong>or</strong>ding to Rayner (1970). Growth rates were measured after 7and 10 d.Phylogenetic analysisGenomic DNA of the isolates was extracted using the method ofDamm et al. (2008). The 5.8S nuclear ribosomal gene with the twoflanking internal transcribed spacers (ITS), a 200-bp intron of theglyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), and partial38
The <strong>Colletotrichum</strong> acutatum <strong>species</strong> <strong>complex</strong>1 change1001.00881.000.99<strong>CBS</strong> 109225 Lupinus Ukraine<strong>CBS</strong> 109216 Lupinus Bolivia<strong>CBS</strong> 513.97 Lupinus Costa Rica<strong>CBS</strong> 109226 Lupinus Canada<strong>CBS</strong> 509.97 Lupinus France<strong>CBS</strong> 466.76 Manihot RwandaIMI 375715 Lupinus Australia<strong>CBS</strong> 122746 Lupinus USA<strong>CBS</strong> 109217 Lupinus Germany<strong>CBS</strong> 485.97 Lupinus Germany1001.000.99 <strong>CBS</strong> 126371 Lupinus NL<strong>CBS</strong> 507.97 Lupinus France<strong>CBS</strong> 109219 Lupinus Germany<strong>CBS</strong> 109220 Lupinus Germany75 <strong>CBS</strong> 109221 Lupinus Germany1.00 <strong>CBS</strong> 109222 Lupinus Germany<strong>CBS</strong> 109223 Lupinus Germany<strong>CBS</strong> 109224 Lupinus Austria<strong>CBS</strong> 109227 Lupinus Poland<strong>CBS</strong> 126525 Lupinus NL<strong>CBS</strong> 119142 Lupinus ZA<strong>CBS</strong> 119143 Lupinus ZAIMI 351261 Camellia UK<strong>CBS</strong> 129944 Cinnamomum P<strong>or</strong>tugal<strong>CBS</strong> 129814 Solanum Colombia<strong>CBS</strong> 129811 Solanum Colombia100 <strong>CBS</strong> 129812 Solanum Colombia<strong>CBS</strong> 129813 Solanum Colombia1.00 <strong>CBS</strong> 129954 Solanum Colombia<strong>CBS</strong> 129955 Solanum Colombia<strong>CBS</strong> 129956 Solanum Colombia<strong>CBS</strong> 129810 Solanum Colombia0.97 <strong>CBS</strong> 101611 fern Costa Rica74 <strong>CBS</strong> 129821 Passifl<strong>or</strong>a Colombia1.00 <strong>CBS</strong> 129820 Passifl<strong>or</strong>a Colombia94 <strong>CBS</strong> 330.75 Coffea Costa Rica1.00 <strong>CBS</strong> 211.78 Coffea Costa RicaIMI 304802 Cuscuta DominicaIMI 384185 Caryocar Brazil<strong>CBS</strong> 129823 Passifl<strong>or</strong>a Colombia<strong>CBS</strong> 114.14 Citrus USA<strong>CBS</strong> 159.84 Cucumis BrazilC. lupiniC. tamarilloiC. costaricenseC. cuscutaeC. limetticolaC. melonisA1A8J6J2J3Clade 1Fig. 1. One of 830 most parsimonious trees obtained from a heuristic search of the combined ITS, GAPDH, CHS-1, ACT, HIS3 and TUB2 sequences alignment of the<strong>Colletotrichum</strong> acutatum <strong>species</strong> <strong>complex</strong>. Bootstrap supp<strong>or</strong>t values above 70 % (bold) and Bayesian posteri<strong>or</strong> probability values above 0.95 are shown at the nodes.<strong>Colletotrichum</strong> <strong>or</strong>chidophilum <strong>CBS</strong> 632.80, <strong>CBS</strong> 631.80, IMI 309357 and <strong>CBS</strong> 119291 are used as outgroup. Numbers of ex-holotype, ex-neotype and ex-epitype strains areemphasised in bold. Strain numbers are followed by substrate (host genus) and country of <strong>or</strong>igin, NL = Netherlands, NZ = New Zealand, ZA = South Africa. Branches that arecrossed by diagonal lines are sh<strong>or</strong>tened by 50 %. C<strong>or</strong>responding groups of Sreenivasaprasad & Talhinhas 2005 are emphasised in red, mtDNA RFLP haplotypes of Guerberet al. (2003) are emphasised in blue.sequences of the chitin synthase 1 (CHS-1), histone3 (HIS3), actin(ACT) and beta-tubulin (TUB2) genes were amplified and sequencedusing the primer pairs ITS-1F (Gardes & Bruns 1993) + ITS-4 (Whiteet al. 1990) <strong>or</strong> V9G (de Hoog & Gerrits van den Ende 1998) + ITS-4, GDF1 + GDR1 (Guerber et al. 2003), CHS-354R + CHS-79F(Carbone & Kohn 1999), CYLH3F + CYLH3R (Crous et al. 2004b),ACT-512F + ACT-783R (Carbone & Kohn 1999) and BT2Fd + BT4R(Woudenberg et al. 2009) <strong>or</strong> T1 (O’Donnell & Cigelnik 1997) + Bt-2b(Glass & Donaldson 1995), respectively. The PCRs were perf<strong>or</strong>medin a 2720 Thermal Cycler (Applied Biosystems, Foster City,Calif<strong>or</strong>nia) in a total volume of 12.5 μL. The GAPDH, CHS-1, HIS3,ACT and TUB2 PCR mixture contained 1 μL 20x diluted genomicDNA, 0.2 μM of each primer, 1x PCR buffer (Bioline, Luckenwalde,Germany), 2 mM MgCl 2, 20 μM of each dNTP, 0.7 μL DMSO and0.25 U Taq DNA polymerase (Bioline). Conditions f<strong>or</strong> PCR of thesegenes constituted an initial denaturation step of 5 min at 94 o C,followed by 40 cycles of 30 s at 94 o C, 30 s at 52 o C and 30 s at72 o C, and a final denaturation step of 7 min at 72 o C, while the ITSPCR was perf<strong>or</strong>med as described by Woudenberg et al. (2009). TheDNA sequences generated with f<strong>or</strong>ward and reverse primers wereused to obtain consensus sequences using Bionumerics v. 4.60(Applied Maths, St-Marthens-Lathem, Belgium), and the alignmentassembled and manually adjusted using Sequence Alignment Edit<strong>or</strong>v. 2.0a11 (Rambaut 2002).To determine whether the six sequence datasets werecongruent and combinable, tree topologies of 70 % reciprocalNeighbour-Joining bootstrap with Maximum Likelihood distances(10 000 replicates) with substitution models determined separatelyf<strong>or</strong> each partition using MrModeltest v. 2.3 (Nylander 2004) werecompared visually (Mason-Gamer & Kellogg 1996). A maximumparsimony analysis was perf<strong>or</strong>med on the multilocus alignment(ITS, GAPDH, CHS-1, HIS3, ACT, TUB2) as well as f<strong>or</strong> each geneseparately with PAUP (Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony) v.4.0b10 (Swoff<strong>or</strong>d 2000) using the heuristic search option with 100random sequence additions and tree bisection and reconstruction(TBR) as the branch-swapping alg<strong>or</strong>ithm. Alignment gaps weretreated as missing and all characters were un<strong>or</strong>dered and of equalweight. No m<strong>or</strong>e than 10 trees of sc<strong>or</strong>e (length) greater than <strong>or</strong> equalto 10 were saved in each replicate. The robustness of the treesobtained was evaluated by 10 000 bootstrap replications using theFast-stepwise addition alg<strong>or</strong>ithm (Hillis & Bull 1993). Tree length,consistency index (CI), retention index (RI), rescaled consistencyindex (RC) and homoplasy index (HI) were calculated f<strong>or</strong> theresulting tree. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) alg<strong>or</strong>ithm wasused to generate phylogenetic trees with Bayesian probabilitiesusing MrBayes v. 3.1.1 (Ronquist & Huelsenbeck 2003) f<strong>or</strong> thecombined sequence datasets. Models of nucleotide substitutionf<strong>or</strong> each gene determined by MrModeltest v. 2.3 were included f<strong>or</strong>each gene partition. The analyses of two MCMC chains were runfrom random trees f<strong>or</strong> 1000 000 generations and sampled every100 generations. The likelihood sc<strong>or</strong>e of the two runs were 2 500and 2 200 and theref<strong>or</strong>e, the first 2 350 (the average of both) treeswere discarded as the burn-in phase of the analysis and posteri<strong>or</strong>probabilities determined from the remaining trees. F<strong>or</strong> additionalcomparison, a Neighbour-Joining analysis was perf<strong>or</strong>med on themultigene alignment using PAUP and 1000 bootstrap replications.Sequences derived in this study have been lodged at GenBank, thealignment in TreeBASE (www.treebase.<strong>or</strong>g/treebase-web/home.html), and taxonomic novelties in MycoBank (Crous et al. 2004a).RESULTSPhylogenyThe six sequence data sets did not show any conflicts in treetopology f<strong>or</strong> the 70 % reciprocal bootstrap trees, which allowed uswww.studiesinmycology.<strong>or</strong>g39