Novel species of fungi described in this study include those from various countries as follows: Argentina, Colletotrichum araujiae on leaves, stems and fruits of Araujia hortorum. Australia, Agaricus pateritonsus on soil, Curvularia fraserae on dying leaf of Bothriochloa insculpta, Curvularia millisiae from yellowing leaf tips of Cyperus aromaticus, Marasmius brunneolorobustus on well-rotted wood, Nigrospora cooperae from necrotic leaf of Heteropogon contortus, Penicillium tealii from the body of a dead spider, Pseudocercospora robertsiorum from leaf spots of Senna tora, Talaromyces atkinsoniae from gills of Marasmius crinis-equi and Zasmidium pearceae from leaf spots of Smilax glyciphylla. Brazil, Preussia bezerrensis fromair. Chile, Paraconiothyrium kelleni from the rhizosphere of Fragaria chiloensis subsp. chiloensis f. chiloensis. Finland, Inocybe udicola onsoilinmixedforest with Betula pendula, Populus tremula, Picea abies and Alnus incana. France, Myrmecridium normannianum on dead culm of unidentified Poaceae. Germany, Vexillomyces fraxinicola from symptomless stem wood of Fraxinus excelsior. India, Diaporthe limoniae on infected fruit of Limonia acidissima, Didymella naikii on leaves of Cajanus cajan, and Fulvifomes mangroviensis on basal trunk of Aegiceras corniculatum. Indonesia, Penicillium ezekielii from Zea mays kernels. Namibia, Neocamarosporium calicoremae and Neocladosporium calicoremae on stems of Calicorema capitata, and Pleiochaeta adenolobi on symptomatic leaves of Adenolobus pechuelii. Netherlands, Chalara pteridii on stems of Pteridium aquilinum, Neomackenziella juncicola (incl. Neomackenziella gen. nov.)and Sporidesmiella junci from dead culms of Juncus effusus. Pakistan, Inocybe longistipitata on soil in a Quercus forest. Poland, Phytophthora viadrina from rhizosphere soil of Quercus robur, and Septoria krystynae on leaf spots of Viscum album. Portugal (Azores), Acrogenospora stellata on dead wood or bark. South Africa, Phyllactinia greyiae on leaves of Greyia sutherlandii and Punctelia anae on bark of Vachellia karroo. Spain, Anteaglonium lusitanicum on decaying wood of Prunus lusitanica subsp. lusitanica, Hawksworthiomyces riparius from fluvial sediments, Lophiostoma carabassense endophytic in roots of Limbarda crithmoides, and Tuber mohedanoi from calcareussoils. Spain (Canary Islands), Mycena laurisilvae on stumps and woody debris. Sweden, Elaphomyces geminus from soil under Quercus robur. Thailand, Lactifluus chiangraiensis on soil under Pinus merkusii, Lactifluus nakhonphanomensis and Xerocomus sisongkhramensis on soil under Dipterocarpus trees. Ukraine, Valsonectria robiniae on dead twigs of Robinia hispida. USA, Spiralomyces americanus (incl. Spiralomyces gen. nov.) from office air. Morphological and culture characteristics are supported by DNA barcodes.

The tomato, Solanum lycopersicum L. is one of the most consumed vegetables in the world; nevertheless, it is affected by biotic and abiotic factors that reduce its productivity. The whitefly is globally considered as the main pest under protected crop conditions, where biologic control using endophytic fungi emerges as a sustainable alternative. We evaluated the indirect effects of five native endophytic strains of Beauveria bassiana on the reproduction of greenhouse whiteflies and the growth of tomatoes. The plant growth substrate was inoculated with five strains of this endophyte and the resulting plants were then exposed to whiteflies afterwards. The effect that endophytic strains had on phosphate solubilization, iron siderophore production, plant height, and plant biomass were evaluated. The evaluated endophytes reduced the number of eggs per cm² on leaflets compared to the control and behaved similarly to the commercial synthetic insecticide. Leaflets inoculated with strains RGM-557, RGM-644 and RGM-731 showed fewer nymphs than the control and those treated with insecticide. RGM-557 and RGM-731 produced the greatest plant heights; RGM-731 obtained the greatest plant biomass. Our study provides evidence that native endophytic strains of B. bassiana have a biocontrol effect on whiteflies and could be used to promote tomato growth.

Vaccinium corymbosum L. is the most cultivated blueberry species in Chile. Chilean fruits typically take up to 50 days to reach oversea markets; therefore, controlling post-harvest pathogens is of outmost importance to maintain international food safety and quality standards. In February 2019, the Microbial Genetic Resources Bank at INIA received fruits of V. corymbosum cv. 'Brigitta Blue' from Mariquina (-39.567869, -72.992461), located in the southern Chilean blueberry production zone, for post-harvest disease diagnosis. Asymptomatic fruits were incubated in moist-chambers at 25 °C with light/darkness cycles of 12 h. After 5 d, some fruits showed sunken areas and small surface wounds that exudated orange masses of conidia; under the epidermis, gray acervuli were also detected. After 15d, these fruits became dehydrated, mummified, and covered by mycelia, all characteristic symptoms of anthracnose (Wharton and Schilder 2008). In Chile, Colletotrichum gloeosporioides has, thus far, been the only causal agent of anthracnose reported in blueberry (Lara et al. 2003). Conidia exudated from the diseased fruit were inoculated on potato-dextrose agar (PDA) and incubated at 25 °C for 7 d. The resulting colony was predominantly cottony with gray aerial mycelium, displaying masses of pale orange conidia; on the reverse side, the colony was a pink-reddish color. Under a microscope, conidia were hyaline, fusiform to elliptic in shape, and displaying guttulate of 12.2±1.2 × 4.17±0.3 μm (n=30), characteristics coinciding with those described for Colletotrichum fioriniae (Pennycook 2017; Shivas and Tan 2009) (Supplementary Figure 1). The isolate was deposited in the Chilean Collection of Microbial Genetic Resources (CChRGM) as RGM 3330. Genomic DNA extraction of RGM 3330 and phylogenetic analyses were carried out according to Cisterna-Oyarce et al. (2022). A multi-locus sequencing analysis was carried out using five genetic markers. The internal transcribed spacer (ITS), glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (gapdh), actin (act), and chitin synthase 1 (chs-1) were PCR-amplified following Damm et al. (2012) and beta-tubulin (tub) following Glass and Donaldson (1995). Sequences were deposited in GenBank (ON364141 for ITS and ON369167-70 for tub, act, chs-1, and gapdh, respectively) (Sayers et al. 2021). A BLAST analysis carried out in SequenceServer (Priyam et al. 2019), using a custom database of sequences retrieved from Damm et al. (2012) and Liu et al. (2020), showed that all genetic markers were 100% identical to those of C. fioriniae CBS 128517T (ITS (540/540 identities), gapdh (249/249), act (245/245), and chs-1 (274/274)), except for tub, which shared 99.8% of its identities (416/417) with this species. Maximum likelihood phylogenetic estimation clustered RGM 3330 with C. fioriniae strains CBS 128517T and CBS 126526 with 100% bootstrap support (Supplementary Figure 1). Koch’s postulates were carried out with asymptomatic fruits of V. corymbosum cv. 'Brigitta Blue'. Prior to inoculation, fruits were surface-sterilized for 10 s in 70% ethanol, 3 s in 1% NaOCl, 10 s in 70% ethanol, rinsed three times with sterile distilled water, and subsequently placed in moist-chambers. Two groups of three repetitions of 20 fruits each were sprayed with 9 × 106 conidia/mL of RGM 3330 for the first group and with sterile distilled water for the control. After 5 d at 25 °C with light/darkness cycles of 12 h, only fruits sprayed with the conidial solution developed symptoms of anthracnose and the re-isolated fungi were identical in morphology to RGM 3330. This is the first report of C. fioriniae in blueberry in Chile. References: Cisterna-Oyarce, V., Carrasco-Fernández, J., Castro, J. F., Santelices, C., Muñoz-Reyes, V., Millas, P., Buddie, A. G., and France, A. 2022. Gnomoniopsis smithogilvyi: identification, characterization and incidence of the main pathogen causing brown rot in postharvest sweet chestnut fruits (Castanea sativa) in Chile. Australasian Plant Disease Notes 17:2. Damm, U., Cannon, P. F., Woudenberg, J. H., and Crous, P. W. 2012. The Colletotrichum acutatum species complex. Stud. Mycol. 73:37-113. Glass, N. L., and Donaldson, G. C. 1995. Development of primer sets designed for use with the PCR to amplify conserved genes from filamentous ascomycetes. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 61:1323-1330. Lara, O., Velazquez, C. G., and Ascencio, C. 2003. Colletotrichum gloeosporiodes in blueberry fruit. in: XIII Congreso de Fitopatología. Liu, X., Zheng, X., Khaskheli, M. I., Sun, X., Chang, X., and Gong, G. 2020. Identification of Colletotrichum species associated with blueberry anthracnose in Sichuan, China. Pathogens 9:718. Pennycook, S. 2017. Colletotrichum fioriniae comb. & stat. nov., resolving a nomenclatural muddle. Mycotaxon 132:149-152. Priyam, A., Woodcroft, B. J., Rai, V., Moghul, I., Munagala, A., Ter, F., Chowdhary, H., Pieniak, I., Maynard, L. J., Gibbins, M. A., Moon, H., Davis-Richardson, A., Uludag, M., Watson-Haigh, N. S., Challis, R., Nakamura, H., Favreau, E., Gómez, E. A., Pluskal, T., Leonard, G., Rumpf, W., and Wurm, Y. 2019. Sequenceserver: a modern graphical user interface for custom BLAST databases. Mol. Biol. Evol. 36:2922-2924. Sayers, E. W., Cavanaugh, M., Clark, K., Pruitt, K. D., Schoch, C. L., Sherry, S. T., and Karsch-Mizrachi, I. 2021. GenBank. Nucleic Acids Res. 49:D92-D96. Shivas, R. G., and Tan, Y. P. 2009. A taxonomic re-assessment of Colletotrichum acutatum, introducing C. fioriniae comb. et stat. nov. and C. simmondsii sp. nov. Fungal Divers. 39:111-122. Wharton, P., and Schilder, A. 2008. Novel infection strategies of Colletotrichum acutatum on ripe blueberry fruit. Plant Pathol. 57:122-134.

Four Botryosphaeria spp. isolated from apple with dieback symptoms, Diplodia mutila, Diplodia seriata, Neofusicoccum arbuti, and Lasiodiplodia theobromae, were subjected to different conditions to induce sporulation, then freeze-dried and stored in glass vials and ampoules at a temperature of 4 ° C using two protective media (skimmed milk powder in water at 20% and a mixture of skimmed milk powder at 20% plus 5% inositol). Viability was assessed after storage periods of 1, 90, 180, and 365 days. Low-nutrient growth conditions on 2% water agar supplemented with pine needles, incubated under UV light (λ = 350 nm) and at 24 ° C, effectively stimulated sporulation of all four Botryosphaeriaceae species. The survival rate of the isolates was similar. Overall viability showed slight but significant differences depending on the type of protective medium and storage container used for the freeze-dried cultures (p < 0.001). Among the tested media, the highest viability was maintained in vacuum-sealed glass ampoules using either a medium containing 20% skimmed milk powder with 5% inositol or 20% skimmed milk powder alone.

Prospection of the endosphere of the native plant Fragaria chiloensis subsp. chiloensis f. patagonica from the foothills of the Chilean Andes led to the isolation of two strains of the genus Coniochaeta. We addressed the taxonomic placement of these strains based on DNA sequencing data using the ITS and LSU genetic markers, morphological features, and biochemical traits. One of these strains was identified as Coniochaeta hansenii, for which the anamorph and teleomorph states were described. The second strain did not seem to match any of the currently described species of this genus; therefore, we propose the name Coniochaeta fragariicola sp. nov.

Chile leads cherry exports in the southern hemisphere with a total of 415.315 t exported in the 2022 to 2023 season (IQonsulting, 2023). Cytospora canker, produced by Cytospora spp., causes destructive infections and limit the productivity of sweet cherry orchards (Luo et al. 2019). This study was focused on isolating Cytospora strains to identify and characterize the species present in sweet cherry. During the period 2019-2022, ten samples of stem or branch presenting canker, dieback, gummosis or dead buds, were collected from sweet cherry cultivars 'Skeena', 'Lapins', 'Santina', 'Sweetheart', and 'Regina', in the regions Ñuble and O'Higgins, Chile. Five mm pieces from the necrotic wood margins of the samples were rinsed with sterile deionized water, placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA, Difco) and incubated at 20±2 ºC for 5 days. One isolate was recovered from each sample, resulting in ten Cytospora-like strains. Single hyphal tips were transferred onto PDA plates and all isolates were deposited in the Chilean Collection of Microbial Genetic Resources (CChRGM). Colonies grown on PDA reached 89 mm in diameter in 10 d at 25 °C, showing irregular margin, lacking aerial mycelium, initially off-white to cream that turned greenish gray in the center, which darkens with age. After 20 days of culturing on pine needle agar (Chen et al. 2015), isolates produced conidiomata pycnidial, semi-immersed, black, and subglobose (362)445-555(681)×(357)528-700(1053) µm (n=10), generating amber slimy conidia masses; Conidiophores were phialidic, cylindrical, aseptate, hyaline (6.77)9-10.04(12.88)×(0.82)1.1-1.28(1.99) µm (n = 30); conidia were abundant, allantoid, hyaline to light brown, aseptate (3.39)4.28-4.57(5.36)×(0.69)0.96-1.09(1.47) µm (n = 30) (Supplementary Figure 1). No sexual morph was observed. With the exception of the strain RGM 3390, all the isolates shared morphological characters to the descriptions of Cytospora sorbicola Norphanph., Bulgakov, T. C. Wen & K. D. Hyde (Norphanphoun et al. 2017). Isolates were identified at species level, by sequencing DNA regions described by Pan et al. (2020): ITS1-5.8S-ITS2, LSU; act, tef-1α, and tub2 with the exception of the RBP2, because this region could not be amplified in seven out of ten isolates. The consensus tree included the concatenated sequences of the ten isolates and those of reference Cytospora species reported by Ilyukhin et al. (2023) using a maximum likelihood analysis with the tool IQ-TREE webserver. MLSA confirmed the taxonomic affiliation of nine of the isolates with C. sorbicola and one isolate with Cytospora sp. (RGM 3390), that might represent a novel species (Supplementary Figure 2). The isolates RGM 3399 and RGM 3400, were selected randomly for pathogenicity tests. Inoculations were performed on 2-year-old sweet cherry cv. 'Lapins' grow in pots in a greenhouse at 26±6°C. Seven plants per isolate were cut to about 6-cm length from the main stem, and inoculated onto fresh cuts with 5-mm mycelium PDA plugs of 5-d-old culture and wrapped in moist sterile cotton and parafilm to keep moisture. Six plants were inoculated with non-colonized PDA agar plugs as control. The average canker length 3 months after inoculation was 3.1 and 0.8 cm, for RGM 3389 and RGM 3400, respectively (Supplementary Figure 1). Symptomatic twigs were incubated in moist chambers at 20±2 ºC for 10 d, resulting in the re-isolation of Cytospora strains that produced pycnidia and conidia structures in agreement with C. sorbicola. Both strains were reidentified to fulfill Koch's postulates, control twigs remained asymptomatic and no fungus was isolated from these twigs. This is the first report of C. sorbicola causing canker on sweet cherry in Chile. Our findings suggest that this species could be the most recurrent in cherry in central Chile, coinciding with it found in California where C. sorbicola has been described as the main causal agent of Cytospora canker of stone fruits in California (Lawrence et al. 2018).