Safagamyces marinus

Calabon, Mark S., Jones, E. B. Gareth, Pang, Ka-Lai, Abdel-Wahab, Mohamed A., Jin, Jing, Devadatha, Bandarupalli, Sadaba, Resurreccion B., Apurillo, Carlo Chris & Hyde, Kevin D., 2023, Updates on the classification and numbers of marine fungi, Botanica Marina (Warsaw, Poland) 66 (4), pp. 213-238 : 228

2.5.21 Safagamyces marinus

Bakhit and Abdel-Wahab (2022) introduced the monotypic genus Safagamyces for the marine asexual species S. marinus that was recorded from decaying stem of Phragmites australis inside Safaga mangrove, Red Sea, Egypt. The taxon is characterized by straight or slightly curved, branched, smooth, 2 – 6 septate conidia and the sympodial conidial proliferation. Conidial cells increase in size and pigmentation from hyaline at the base to dark brown at the apex.

Phylogenetic analysis of a combined SSU and LSU rDNA sequences dataset placed S. marinus in the Halosphaeriaceae as a distinct basal branch to a node that contains the following marine genera: Antennospora , Cirrenalia , Cucullosporella , Cucurbitinus , Halosarpheia , Morakotiella , Pileomyces , Pseudolignincola and Remispora ( Bakhit and Abdel-Wahab 2022) . Safagamyces marinus is phylogenetically distant from the other two asexual genera: Cirrenalia and Cucurbitinus by having straight or slightly curved, branched conidia that are brown in colour with sympodial conidial proliferation. Conidia in Cirrenalia macrocephala are helicoid, reddish fuscous with determinate conidiogenesis ( Meyers and Moore 1960; Zhao et al. 2007). Cucurbitinus species have straight or slightly curved conidia with constricted septa with determinate conidiogenesis. Both species of Cucurbitinus have larger conidial dimensions than S. marinus ( Hernández-Restrepo et al. 2017; Kohlmeyer and Volkmann-Kohlmeyer 1991; Liu et al. 2020; Schmidt 1985).