Cyphellophora adelaidensis sp. nov. isolated from a chronic elbow infection, Australia

The genus Cyphellophora belongs to the order Chaetothyriales, family Cyphellophoraceae, and accommodates various species that have previously been reported as a cause of infection in humans. Here, we report a case of presumptive dermal phaeohyphomycosis of the elbow from a patient in Adelaide, Australia. Biopsies showed fungal growth on culture but subsequent molecular identification by ITS sequencing could not resolve the identity, with a low similarity match to Cyphellophora pauciseptata (89.3% similarity) observed. Hence, the isolate was subjected to nanopore genome sequencing to enable multi-gene phylogenetic analysis. The de novo genome assembly was found to consist of 23 nuclear fragments (size range 16,678-4716,474 bp) totalling 26,281,485 bp with a coverage of 17X, the mitochondrial genome was 29,902 bp in size and had a coverage of 277X. Ab initio gene annotation reported 11,251 genes and a GC-content of 54.17%. To define the phylogenetic placement, the ITS and LSU ribosomal DNA, BT2 and RPB1 loci were extracted from the assembled genome and compared to available sequence data from NCBI GenBank. The isolate was found to represent a distinct genetic lineage within the Cyphellophora, which we describe here as a new species, Cyphellophora adelaidensis.