Diversity of fungi associated with macroalgae from an estuarine environment and description of sp. nov. and sp. nov.

Fungal communities associated with macroalgae remain largely unexplored. To characterize algicolous fungal communities using culture dependent methods, macroalgae were collected from different sampling sites in the Ria de Aveiro estuary, Portugal. From a collection of 486 isolates that were obtained, 213 representative isolates were selected through microsatellite-primed PCR (MSP-PCR) fingerprinting analysis. The collection yielded 33 different genera, which were identified using the ITS region of the rDNA. The results revealed that the most abundant taxa in all collections were -like species: , , and . The fungal community composition varied with macroalgae species. Through multilocus phylogenetic analyses based on ITS, , and sequences, in addition to detailed morphological data, we propose sp. nov. (type strain=CMG 28=MUM 19.39) and sp. nov. (type strain=CMG 29=MUM 19.40) as novel species.