The result from our studies revealed that the C. gloeosporioides
harbor as endophytic fungi on the leaves of tea plant. Previous
report also revealed that C. gloeosporioides was also frequently
isolated as endophytic fungi from tissues of healthy leaves and
branches of tea plant [34]. Though the leaves of tea plant were
only the sole source of isolation tremendous variations on
morphological characteristics, i.e., colony color, growth rate
and rate of sporulation were observed among the isolates. A
previous research on C. gloeosporioides indicated that they
were also classified into three groups based on morphological
and cultural characteristics which were isolated from banana,
ginger and Eupatorium thymifolia and sub grouping of those
isolates indicated the complexity of the species [30]. We also
divided our isolates into two groups based on the production
of conidial masses on the fungal colony and we did not find
any difference on spore size, growth rate and sporulation rate
of the isolate of the two groups. Hence, it can be concluded
that spore size, growth rate and sporulation rate are not dependent
on the production of conidial masses on the fungal
colony.
Analysis of ITS-rDNA sequences divided all the thirty isolates
into two groups. One group contained twenty-three isolates
which were clustered with two r-DNA ITS sequence of
C. gloeosporioides (GQ424104 and GQ414205) published in
NCBI GenBank database. Another group contained seven
isolates and clustered with C. kahawae (JN715845) published
in NCBI GenBank database. Previous studies reported a
close genetic relationship between C. gloeosporioides and
C. kahawae when sequences of ITS r-DNA were analyzed
which differed from each other only for two to three bases,
i.e., 98.8–98.2% [30]. C. gloeosporioides, C. kahawae and
Colletotrichum fragariae were not suggested to be considered
as separate species due to their closeness on molecular analysis
[9,5,22]. High degrees of molecular similarities were found
among C. gloeosporioides, C. fragariae and C. kahawae isolates
upon analyses of ribosomal and mitochondrial sequences using
Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Tool [45]. We
also agree with the above previous research and would like
to conclude that all the isolates of our studies belong to
C. gloeosporioides on the basis of morphological characteristics
and molecular analysis.
The purpose of our research was to study the morphological
and genetic variability among all the isolates of
C. gloeosporioides and to establish possible relationship of