Dothiorella Sacc.

Pereira, Diana S. & Phillips, Alan J. L., 2023, Botryosphaeriaceae on palms-a new species of Neodeightonia, N. chamaeropicola, and new records from diseased foliage of ornamental palms in Portugal, Phytotaxa 627 (1), pp. 1921-1935 : 1921-1935

Dothiorella Sacc. , Michelia 2: 5 (1880), MycoBank MB8098

Dothiorella was introduced by Saccardo (1880) with D. pyrenophora as the type species. The genus has been subjected to many taxonomic changes in the past, since the name has been used for both Fusicoccum and Neofusicoccum asexual morphs. Crous & Palm (1999) reduced Dothiorella to synonymy under Diplodia based on a broad morphological concept. However, Phillips et al. (2005) re-examined the holotype of D. pyrenophora and found that it differed from Diplodia and based on morphology and molecular data of ITS and tef1 resurrected Dothiorella and emended the genus description. Types of both genera were re-examined by Crous et al. (2006) who confirmed these morphological differences and, based on partial sequences of the LSU gene, also showed that Dothiorella and Diplodia strains were phylogenetically different lineages. Dothiorella and Spencermartinsia were earlier considered to be two separate genera in Botryosphaeriaceae based on morphological characters of the sexual morphs ( Phillips et al. 2008, 2013, Dissanayake et al. 2016a). Nevertheless, with the increase in the number of species over the years, the phylogenetic separation between Dothiorella and Spencermartinsia has become less distinct and could not be resolved by Slippers et al. 2013 based on the phylogenetic analysis of six gene regions. Likewise, Yang et al. (2017) showed that species of Spencermartinsia clustered within Dothiorella , and the two genera were considered to be synonymous. Species in Dothiorella are characterized by 1-septate conidia that become brown at an early stage of their development and while still attached to the conidiogenous cells, and teleomorphs with brown, 1-septate ascospores ( Phillips et al. 2005, 2008, 2013, Crous et al. 2006). They are found as pathogens, endophytes and saprobes in a wide range of hosts, though it is not clear whether species have narrow or wide host distributions ( Abdollahzadeh et al. 2014, Pitt et al. 2015, Dissanayake et al. 2016b, You et al. 2017, Berraf-Tebbal et al. 2020). Although more than 400 species epithets are listed in MycoBank and similar databases ( Crous et al. 2004), only a limited number of them are known from culture. Besides, while 36 species have been accepted based on morpho-molecular analyses by Dissanayake et al. 2016a, many species have been introduced since and 15 of those have been recently synonymized ( Zhang et al. 2021a). Presently, 33 species of Dothiorella known from culture have been accepted based on both morphology and DNA sequence data, and, except for D. sarmentorum , all species have been introduced since 2005 ( Phillips et al. 2013, Slippers et al. 2017, Xiao et al. 2021, Rathnayaka et al. 2022a,b).