Culturable plant pathogenic fungi associated with sugarcane in southern China

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) is one of the oldest crops cultivated by mankind. Numerous fungal taxa have been reported from this host, although most were not identified beyond genus level. In this study, we explored 31 sampling sites in Guangxi and Guangdong Provinces (China), and collected 370 diseased samples from leaves and roots of sugarcane, from which 762 strains were isolated. Our preliminary analysis based on internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences suggested that these isolates belonged to 143 species in 51 genera, but we could not assign 129 strains. Bipolaris, Chaetomium, Curvularia, Phoma and Nigrospora represented the top five most common genera identified, while 27 rare genera comprised only one identified species. In this study, we chose above mentioned common genera for in-depth morphological observations and multi-locus analyses, in order to identify these strains to species level. In this paper, we described one new genus, 32 new species, and reported 19 new records for China and the asexual morph of Chaetomium olivaceum. Hitherto, this is the most comprehensive study with molecular identification and illustration of fungi associated with sugarcane, which greatly improves our understanding of culturable mycota associated with this host.