English
First Report of Humicola phialophoroides Isolated from Red Pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) in Korea
Seo-Ryeong Lee1, Hae-Dam Kim1, Seong-Keun Lim1, Yu-Min Kim1, Gyeong-Cheol Lee1, Seung-Yeol Lee1,2*, Hee-Young Jung1,2
1Department of Plant Medicine, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea
2Institute of Plant Medicine, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, Korea
*Email: leesy1123@knu.ac.kr
In 2025, the fungal strain KNUF-25-YP1 was isolated from the inner stem tissue of red pepper (Capsicum annuum L.) collected from Yeongyang-gun, Gyeongbuk Province, Korea. To observe its cultural and morphological characteristics, the strain was cultured on potato dextrose agar (PDA), oatmeal agar (OA), malt extract agar (MEA), corn meal agar (CMA), and potato carrot agar (PCA). On PDA and OA media, it produced dichotomously branched conidiophores with lageniform phialides (8.4–13.9 × 2.4–3.5 μm), hyaline spherical conidia (1.6–2.6 μm), and brown aleuriospores (6.7–10.2 μm). For molecular analysis, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions and the large subunit of ribosomal RNA (LSU) gene were analyzed. BLAST analysis revealed that KNUF-25-YP1 shared high sequence similarity with Humicola phialophoroides CBS 125784T, showing 99.8% similarity in both the ITS regions and LSU gene sequences. The maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree was constructed based on the concatenated sequences of ITS region and LSU gene, and strain KNUF-25-YP1 clustered with H. phialophoroides CBS 125784T. The observed cultural and morphological characteristics of KNUF-25-YP1 were consistent with those previously reported for H. phialophoroides CBS 125784T. Based on these results, strain KNUF-25-YP1 was identified as H. phialophoroides, which has not been previously reported in Korea.
