A newspecies of Pezicula, P. neosporulosa associatedwith Abies alba in the Netherlands and A.beshanzuensis in China is described, illustrated and compared to its sister species P. sporulosa,P. cinnamomea and P. eucrita. Morphologically, P. neosporulosa is shown to be similar to P.sporulosa both in sexual and asexual sporulating structures. However, from China the species is only known fromendophytic isolates, and sporulating structureswere never obtained in them. In contrast to the three sister species, the new species does not produce microconidia directly from ascospores or from macroconidia, but only from conidiophores in conidiomata. Moreover, the colony appearance is highly variable in endophytic isolates.
Bayesian, maximum parsimony and maximum-likelihood phylogenetic analyses based on
four unlinked loci (internal transcribed spacer, RPB2, TEF-1a and b-tubulin) in concatenated datasets confirmed that all isolates in P. neosporulosa were well separated fromclosely allied species with high bootstrap value and posterior probability. Taken together, the molecular and morphological evidence supports the introduction of P. neosporulosa as a novel taxon.