Occurrence of Neopestalotiopsis clavispora Causing Leaf Spot on Dendrobium officinale in China

Dendrobium officinale Kimura L., an endangered orchid plant, is a rare and precious Chinese herb and widely used to prepare Chinese traditional medicine (Zheng et al. 2005). In August 2021, significant indications of an unknown leaf spot disease were observed on greenhouse-grown D. officinale in Yueqing of Wenzhou (28.39°N, 121.04°E), Zhejiang Province, China, the main producing location of this orchid plant. Approximately twenty percent of plants surveyed showed typical infection symptoms. Initially, the symptoms appeared as small, circular black spots. As the disease developed, the center of the lesions was sunken with a black border. To determine the causal agent, 10 symptomatic plant samples were collected and all pieces from symptomatic plant leaves were used for isolating pathogen. Tissues between healthy and necrotic area were cut into pieces (5 × 5 mm, n=10), disinfected with 10% sodium hypochlorite for 1 minute, rinsed 3 times with sterile water, and dried on sterile tissue. Samples were then placed on potato dextrose agar medium (PDA) for 1 piece per plate, and incubated at 25℃ in a dark biochemical incubator. After 3 days, hyphal tips growing from the disinfected tissues were individually transferred to new PDA plates and incubated at 25℃ in the dark. Twelve same fungal isolates were obtained from all symptomatic leave fragments, then DDO11 was chosen as a representative isolate for further study. The colonies showed white aerial mycelium after 5 days culture at 25°C on PDA. Black viscous acervuli appeared and scattered on the surface of the colony after 8-12 days culture. Conidia were spindle shape, five cells, four septa, average 29.3 × 8.5 μm (n = 30; length × width). The apical and basal cells were lighter in color, and most of them were hyaline. The middle three cells were darker in color, and mostly brown. There are 2 to 4 colorless and transparent unbranched accessory filaments at the top, 32.5 µm in average length, and the basal cell has a small appendage, 9.2 µm in average length, n=30. For fungal identification to species level, Internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, β-tubulin gene (TUB2) and translation elongation factor-1α (TEF-1α) were amplified (Qiu et al. 2020), respectively. The ITS, TUB2 and TEF-1α gene sequences of the representative isolate DDO11 were deposited in NCBI GenBank nucleotide database with accession numbers OK631881, OK655895 and OK655896, respectively. BLASTn analysis respectively showed 100%, 100% and 99.6% nucleotide sequence identity with Neopestalotiopsis clavispora strain accessions MG729690, MG740736 and MH423940, which indicated that the pathogen belonged N. clavispora. A maximum-likelihood phylogenetic analysis based on multi-locus sequence (ITS, TUB2, and TEF-1α) using MEGA X showed the similar result (Kumar et al. 2018). To verify pathogenicity, thirty 1-year-old healthy D. officinale plants of cultivar Yandang1 were used for inoculation tests. Spores of N. clavispora DDO11 were produced on PDA for 7 days at 28°C and washed with sterile distilled water, and the concentrations were adjusted to 1 × 106 spores/ml using a hemocytometer. Fifteen surface disinfected healthy plants were inoculated by spraying the suspension (2 ml, 1 × 106 spores/ml) and covered with plastic bags for 24 h, and another 15 plants treated with sterile distilled water were used as control. The plants were placed in a humidified chamber (>95% relative humidity) at 25°C for 48 h after inoculation and kept in a growth chamber (Kiangnan, China) at 25°C with 12-h day/night cycle for 8 days (Cao et al. 2019). All inoculated leaves showed symptoms identical to those observed in the field. No disease occurred on the controls. The Neopestalotiopsis isolate was reisolated from the symptomatic leaves, and species identification was confirmed by the morphological and molecular method described above. N. clavispora has been reported to cause diseases on a variety of plants all over the world, such as strawberry (Gilardi et al. 2019), blue berry (Shi et al. 2021), Syzygium cumini (Banerjee et al. 2020), Macadamia (Qiu et al. 2020), and so on. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of N. clavispora causing leaf spot on D. officinale in China. This report will help us to recognize the leaf spot disease of D. officinale and establish a foundation for future studies on N. clavispora to address effective management strategies.