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1 Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Sciences, University of Szeged, PO Box 533, H-6701 Szeged, Hungary
2 Cereal Research Non-Profit Company, PO Box 391, H-6701 Szeged, Hungary
3 Center for Microbial Biotechnology, BioCentrum-DTU, Building 221, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs Lyngby, Denmark
4 Institute of Sciences of Food Production, CNR, Via Amendola 122/O, 70126 Bari, Italy
5 CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre, Uppsalalaan 8, 3584 CT Utrecht, The Netherlands
Correspondence
János Varga
jvarga{at}cbs.knaw.nl
| ABSTRACT |
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-tubulin and calmodulin gene sequences, by amplified fragment length polymorphism analysis and by extrolite profiles. A. brasiliensis isolates produced naphtho-
-pyrones, tensidol A and B and pyrophen in common with Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus tubingensis, but also several unique compounds, justifying their treatment as representing a separate species. None of the isolates were found to produce ochratoxin A, kotanins, funalenone or pyranonigrins. The novel species was most closely related to A. niger, and was isolated from soil from Brazil, Australia, USA and The Netherlands, and from grape berries from Portugal. The type strain of Aspergillus brasiliensis sp. nov. is CBS 101740T (=IMI 381727T=IBT 21946T).
The GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ accession numbers for the
-tubulin, ITS and calmodulin gene sequences determined in this study are shown in Table 1.
The Mycobank accession number for Aspergillus brasiliensis sp. nov. is MB510581 (http://www.mycobank.org).
Neighbour-joining trees based on ITS and calmodulin gene sequence data of Aspergillus section Nigri, a dendrogram based on cluster analysis of AFLP data and tables listing the Aspergillus section Nigri strains used in AFLP analysis and the extrolites produced by the Aspergillus brasiliensis isolates are available with the online version of this paper.
| INTRODUCTION |
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Black aspergilli are one of the more difficult groups regarding classification and identification. The taxonomy of Aspergillus section Nigri has been studied by many taxonomists and was recently reviewed by Abarca et al. (2004)
. Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) polymorphisms and PCR-based techniques led to the recognition of at least two species within the A. niger species complex (Aspergillus niger, Aspergillus tubingensis) (Kusters-van Someren et al., 1991
; Varga et al., 1994
). Regarding other black Aspergillus species, phylogenetic analyses of sequences of the intergenic transcribed spacer and the 5.8S rRNA gene (ITS region) and the D1–D2 region of the 28S rRNA gene indicated that, apart from those mentioned earlier, at least five other species belong to section Nigri: Aspergillus heteromorphus, Aspergillus ellipticus, Aspergillus carbonarius, Aspergillus japonicus and Aspergillus aculeatus (Varga et al., 2000
; Parenicova et al., 2001
). Several other black Aspergillus species have been described recently, including Aspergillus vadensis (de Vries et al., 2005
), Aspergillus costaricaensis, Aspergillus piperis, Aspergillus lacticoffeatus and Aspergillus sclerotioniger (Samson et al., 2004
) and Aspergillus ibericus (Serra et al., 2006
).
During a survey of black Aspergillus isolates collected worldwide, we discovered some strains that did not fit into any species of Aspergillus section Nigri. We have used a polyphasic taxonomic approach in order to determine the delimitation and variability of this novel species. For phenotypic analyses, macro- and micromorphologies of the isolates were examined, and secondary metabolite and enzyme profiles were studied. For genotypic studies, partial sequences of the
-tubulin and calmodulin genes and the ITS region of the rRNA gene cluster and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) profiles were analysed (also used by Geiser et al., 1998
; Varga et al., 2000
; Hong et al., 2006
; Perrone et al., 2004
, 2006
).
| METHODS |
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Extrolite analysis.
Extrolites were analysed by HPLC using alkylphenone retention indices and diode array UV-VIS detection as described by Frisvad & Thrane (1987)
, with modifications as described by Smedsgaard (1997)
. Standards of ochratoxin A and B, aflavinines, asperazine, austdiol, kotanin and other extrolites from the collection at Biocentrum-DTU (Denmark) were used to compare the extrolites from the species under study. Pyranonigrin A, tensidol A and B and pyrophen were identified by comparison with literature UV and MS data (Hiort et al., 2004
; Fukuda et al., 2006
).
Isolation and analysis of nucleic acids.
Total nucleic acids were isolated according to the literature (Leach et al., 1986
). Fragments containing the region encoding the intergenic transcribed spacer 1 (ITS-1), 5.8S rDNA and intergenic transcribed spacer 2 (ITS-2) were amplified using primers ITS1 and ITS4, as described previously (Varga et al., 2000
) and by White et al. (1990)
. Amplification of part of the
-tubulin gene was performed using the primers Bt2a and Bt2b (Glass & Donaldson, 1995;
Samson et al., 2004
). Amplifications of the partial calmodulin gene were set up as described previously (Serra et al., 2006
). Sequence analysis was performed with a Big Dye Terminator Cycle Sequencing Ready Reaction kit for both strands, and the sequences were aligned with the MT Navigator software (Applied Biosystems). All the sequencing reactions were purified by gel filtration through Sephadex G-50 (Amersham Pharmacia Biotech) equilibrated in double-distilled water and analysed on an ABI PRISM 310 Genetic Analyzer (Applied Biosystems). The resulting sequences of all the isolates were aligned by using the CLUSTAL method with the program DNAMAN (Lynnon Corporation). The unique ITS,
-tubulin and calmodulin sequences were deposited in the GenBank nucleotide sequence database (Table 1
).
AFLP analysis.
Twenty-three strains belonging to Aspergillus section Nigri were analysed by AFLP analysis (see Supplementary Table S1 available in IJSEM Online). Fungal strains were grown in shake cultures (150 r.p.m., 25 °C, 2 days) in Wickerham's medium (40 g glucose, 5 g peptone, 3 g yeast extract, 3 g malt extract and distilled water to 1 l). Genomic DNA was extracted using an E.Z.N.A. Fungal DNA Miniprep kit (Omega Bio-tek), according to the manufacturer's protocol. The DNA was dissolved in sterile water, diluted to 20 ng µl–1 and stored at –20 °C.
We used an AFLP Microbial Fingerprinting kit (Applied Biosystems-Perkin-Elmer Corporation) according to the manufacturer's instructions using primer combinations according to Perrone et al. (2006)
. Peak height thresholds were set at 200. Genotyper software (Applied Biosystems) was set to medium smoothing. Bands of the same size in different individuals were assumed to be identical and to represent the same allele. Bands of different sizes were treated as independent loci with two alleles (present and absent). Data were analysed with an AFLP manager database developed by ACGT BioInformatica S.r.l. and were exported in a binary format with 1 for the presence of a band/peak and 0 for its absence. For clustering two different analyses were performed, fragments between 100 and 500 bp and between 200 and 500 bp were analysed with NTSYS software by using the Dice similarity coefficient and clustered by using the unweighted pair group method (UPGMA) (Nei & Li, 1979
).
Analysis of sequence data.
Sequence alignments were performed by using CLUSTAL_X (Thompson et al., 1997
) and improved manually. Evolutionary distances between the sequences were calculated using Kimura's formula (Kimura, 1980
) with the program DNADIST of the PHYLIP program package (Felsenstein, 1995
). Phylogenetic trees were prepared by using the neighbour-joining method (Saitou & Nei, 1987
) with the program NEIGHBOR of the PHYLIP package. Bootstrap values were calculated from 1000 replications of the bootstrap procedure using programs SEQBOOT, DNADIST, NEIGHBOR and CONSENSE of the package (Felsenstein, 1985
, 1995
). For parsimony analysis, the PAUP* version 4.0 software was used (Swofford, 2000). Aspergillus flavus CBS 100927T was used as an outgroup in these experiments.
| RESULTS AND DISCUSSION |
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-xylosidases (Pedersen et al., 2007
-pyrones (including aurasperone B), pyrophen (Barnes et al., 1990
|
-tubulin and calmodulin genes, identified another three and four isolates, respectively, which were found to be related to the Brazilian strains. These strains were isolated from soil from Brazil, Australia, USA and The Netherlands, and from grape berries from Portugal (Table 1
We examined the genetic relatedness of these isolates to other black aspergilli using sequence analysis of the ITS region of the rRNA gene cluster and parts of the calmodulin and
-tubulin genes. The isolates were found to form a monophyletic clade supported by high bootstrap values on phylogenetic trees based on
-tubulin, ITS and calmodulin sequence data (Fig. 1
and Supplementary Figs S1 and S2 in IJSEM Online). During analysis of part of the
-tubulin gene, 392 characters were analysed. Among the 193 polymorphic sites, 160 were found to be phylogenetically informative. The neighbour-joining tree based on partial
-tubulin gene sequences is shown in Fig. 1
. The topology of the tree is the same as that of a parsimony tree constructed by using the program PAUP (length, 414 steps; consistency index, 0.6836; retention index, 0.8039). The calmodulin dataset included 671 characters, with 283 parsimony informative characters. The topologies of the neighbour-joining tree (Supplementary Fig. S1) and the parsimony tree were the same (tree length, 718; consistency index, 0.6964; retention index, 0.8546). The ITS dataset included 479 characters with 70 parsimony informative characters. The neighbour-joining tree shown in Supplementary Fig. S2 has the same topology as the parsimony tree (tree length, 139; consistency index, 0.8849; retention index, 0.9342).
|
Our Aspergillus species concept is based on a polyphasic approach (Frisvad & Samson, 2004
): A novel species is different from any other species in a diagnostic sense in both phenotypic and genotypic features. Here we have used morphological, physiological and chemotaxonomical features to characterize the phenotype and sequencing of three genes combined with AFLP results to characterize the isolates genotypically. Because the isolates were unique with regard to morphology, extrolite profiles and genotypic features, we propose the name Aspergillus brasiliensis sp. nov. for these isolates.
The name brasiliensis refers to the locality where the culture was isolated. Since its discovery the species has also been found in other localities, but we propose to maintain the name to avoid confusion because the epithet has been used and cited in various publications.
Latin diagnosis of Aspergillus brasiliensis Varga, Frisvad et Samson sp. nov.
Coloniae post 7 dies 71–76 mm diam in agaro CYA et CYAS dicto, in MEA 52–70 mm, in YES 75–80 mm, in agaro farina avenacea confecto 32–36 mm, in CREA 32–44 mm. Coloniae primum albae, deinde obscure brunneae vel atrae, reverseum cremeum vel dilute brunneum. Conidiorum capitula primum globosa, deinde radiantia, nonnumquam in nonnullas columnas divisa; stipes 700–1700x8–13 µm, crassitunicatus, levis, dilute brunneus; vesiculae 30–45 µm diam, fere globosae; capitula biseriata; metulae quasi totam superficiem vesiculae obtegentes, 22–30x3–6 µm; phialides lageniformes, 7–9x3–4 µm; conidia subglobosa, 3.5–4.8 µm diam, echinulata. Sclerotia haud visa.
Typus siccus in herb. CBS 101740T (=IMI 381727T=IBT 21946T) et ex-typus vivus, isolatus e solo in Pedreira, S
o Paulo, Brasilia.
Description of Aspergillus brasiliensis Varga, Frisvad & Samson sp. nov.
Aspergillus brasiliensis (bra.si'li.en'sis. N.L. masc. adj. brasiliensis from Brazil, the place of isolation).
Colony diameters at 7 days: CYA at 25 and 37 °C, and CYAS at 25 °C: 71–76 mm; MEA 52–70 mm; YES 75–80 mm; OA 32–36 mm; CREA 32–44 mm, poor growth, strong acid production. Colony first white then dark brown to black (Fig. 2
). Exudates absent, reverse cream-coloured to light brown. Conidial heads globose at first and later radiate occasionally developing into several conidial columns; stipes 700–1700x8–13 µm, walls thick, smooth, pale brown; vesicles 30–45 µm wide, nearly globose; biseriate; metulae covering virtually the entire surface of the vesicle, measuring 22–30x3–6 µm; phialides flask-shaped, 7–9x3–4 µm; conidia subglobose, 3.5–4.8 µm in diameter, echinulate. No sclerotia observed in the culture ex type. All isolates produced several naphtho-
-pyrones (including aurasperone B), tensidol A and B and pyrophen.
|
o Paulo, Brasil. Isolates ITEM 4544 and ITEM 6139 produce large white sclerotia.
| ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS |
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