First Report of a Rare Fugal Species, Ramicandelaber taiwanensis, Isolated from Soil in Korea

First Report of a Rare Fugal Species, 

Ramicandelaber taiwanensis, Isolated from Soil in Korea

Ju Chan Son, Thuong T.T. Nguyen and Hyang Burm Lee*

Environmental Microbiology Lab, Dept. of Agricultural Biological Chemistry, College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, Chonnam National University, Gwangju 61186, Korea;

*Email:hblee@jnu.ac.kr

Genus Ramicandelaber has now been assigned to the phylum Kickxellomycota, order Ramicandelaberales, and family Ramicandelaberaceae. It consists of only 4 accepted species. There are no published reports of this genus in Korea. In course of investigating fungal species diversity, one Ramicandelaber strain, EML-HN12S-4S2 was isolated from a soil sample collected at Hansando Island located in Tongyeong, Gyeongnam Province, Korea. BLASTn search of the ITS, LSU sequences via NCBI database indicated that the strain EML-HN12S-4S2 was closest to Ramicandelaber taiwanensis RZPS0401 (GenBank accession no. HQ542911) and Ramicandelaber taiwanensis PLS0601 (GenBank accession no. HQ542916) with identity values of 96.47% (765/793bp) in ITS and 100.00% (673/673bp) in LSU sequence data, respectively. Based on the morphological characteristics and sequence analyses of ITS and LSU rDNA, the EML-HN12S-4S2 strain was confirmed as Ramicandelaber taiwanensis, one of the four species belonging to the genus. The phylogeny based on multi-loci and cultural properties of the undescribed species will be presented in the poster session.

KEYWORDS:Ramicandelaber; Kickxellomycota; soil; morphology; taxonomy