available online at www.studiesinmycology.org Studies in Mycology 66: 31–69. 2010. doi:10.3114/sim.2010.66.03 Phylogeny and systematics of the genus Calonectria L. Lombard1*, P.W. Crous2, B.D. Wingfield3 and M.J. Wingfield1 1Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, Tree Protection Co-operative Programme, Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa; 2CBS-KNAW Fungal Biodiversity Centre, Uppsalalaan 8, 3584 CT Utrecht, The Netherlands; 3Department of Genetics, Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa *Correspondence: Lorenzo Lombard,
[email protected] Abstract: Species of Calonectria are important plant pathogens, several of which have a worldwide distribution. Contemporary taxonomic studies on these fungi have chiefly relied on DNA sequence comparisons of the β-tubulin gene region. Despite many new species being described, there has been no phylogenetic synthesis for the group since the last monographic study almost a decade ago. In the present study, the identity of a large collection of Calonectria isolates from various geographic regions was determined using morphological and DNA sequence comparisons. This resulted in the discovery of seven new species; Ca. densa, Ca. eucalypti, Ca. humicola, Ca. orientalis, Ca. pini, Ca. pseudoscoparia and Ca. sulawesiensis, bringing the total number of currently accepted Calonectria species to 68. A multigene phylogeny was subsequently constructed for all available Calonectria spp., employing seven gene regions, namely actin, β-tubulin, calmodulin, histone H3, the internal transcribed spacer regions 1 and 2 and the 5.8S gene of the ribosomal RNA, 28S large subunit RNA gene and translation elongation 1-alpha.