Abstract
A new species of Fonsecaea, Fonsecaea nubica, morphologically similar to F. pedrosoi and F. monophora, is described using multilocus molecular data including AFLP profiles, sequences of the ribosomal internal transcribed spacers (ITS), and partial sequences of the cell division cycle (cdc42), β-tubulin (tub1) and actin (act1) genes. A phylogenetic approach was used to evaluate species delimitation. Topologies of the trees were concordant. Fonsecaea strains could be classified into three major entities, i.e., one representing Fonsecaea pedrosoi isolates, another consisting of strains of F. monophora, and a third, unnamed group comprising isolates mostly recovered from cases of chromoblastomycosis in South America and China. F. nubica is part of this latter group. Based on strains analyzed thus far, we have found that the pathologies of these three Fonsecaea species are somewhat different in that F. pedrosoi and F. nubica are preponderantly associated with chromoblastomycosis, while F. monophora may also act as a systemic opportunist in cases involving brain infections. The latter species is also the most frequently recovered of the three from environmental samples.
Acknowledgements
We thank S. B. J. Menken for useful suggestions. We also thank A. Bonifaz for providing some isolates. The work of Mohammad Javad Najafzadeh was financially supported by the Ministry of Health and Medical Education of Iran and school of medicine, Mashhad University of medical sciences, Mashhad, Iran and the work of Vania A. Vicente was supported by Brazilian Government fellowship from Coordenação de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).
Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.
This paper was first published online on Early Online on 17 March 2010.