Isolation and morphological and molecular characterization of Escovopsis strains isolated from leaf-cutting ant nests from Argentina

Abstract

Escovopsis is a genus recently described for which 5 new species have described in the last 6 years. The identification of fungal species is based on morphological structures. Currently, the use of genetic markers based on ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences has gained acceptance in numerous applications, such as the molecular identification of the fungal diversity. The objective of this work was to isolate and identify morphologically and molecularly Escovopsis strains native from Argentina. Three strains of Escovopsis were isolated from different samples of soil and fungal gardens from nests of leaf-cutting ants. Taxonomic identification and subsequent DNA extraction was carried out. The ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 region of the rDNA was amplified. This is the first work that records the isolation and morphological identification of strains of fungi of the genus Escovopsis native of Misiones (Argentina): 2 belonging to E. weberi and 1 to E. microspora. Particularly, for the E. microspora strain, it was possible to complement the morphological identification with molecular methods and phylogenetic analysis. The nucleotide sequence obtained from E. microspora represents a contribution for future studies in the area of molecular analysis of the ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 region of the genus Escovopsis.