Penicillium dravuni, a new marine-derived species from an alga in Fiji

Abstract

Penicillium dravuni is a new monoverticillate, sclerotium-forming species that was isolated from the alga Dictyosphaeria versluyii collected in Dravuni, Fiji. This species morphologically is similar to P. turbatum in the P. turbatum subseries of the P. thomii series of the Monoverticillata. The nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer region exhibited 97% sequence similarity to known Penicillium spp. in the GenBank database. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that P. dravuni is related most closely to Eupenicillium brefeldianum, E. levitum, E. reticulosporum, E. javanicum, E. ehrlichii and P. simplicissimum. However this new species shares only a distant ancestor with this clade because it branches by itself early in the lineage. P. dravuni also is known to produce the secondary metabolites dictyosphaeric acids A and B and carviolin.

• Dictyosphaeria
• dictyosphaeric acids
• carviolin
• ITS
• marine-derived
• Trichocomaceae

The authors thank Stephen Peterson for valuable answers to frequent questions and for sequencing and depositing many ITS-LSU sequences of Penicillia to GenBank. At Wyeth, we thank Dave Fruhling for providing sequencing and Jennifer Liang for the SEM images. We also thank the National Cooperative Drug Discovery Group (NCDDG) that made the collection possible.