CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Small-spored Alternaria has been isolated from a wide variety of food crops, causing both economic losses and human health risk due to the metabolites produced. Its taxonomy has been discussed worldwide during the last years, but no scientific consensus could be established in this field up to now. Considering Argentina is a major exporter of agricultural products, it is essential to deeply understand the physiological behaviour of this pathogen in a food safety context. Thus, the objective of this work was to characterize small-spored Alternaria spp. obtained from tomato fruits, pepper fruits, wheat grains and blueberries from Argentina by a polyphasic approach, involving metabolomic and phylogenetic analyses based on molecular and morphological characters. Morphological analysis divided the population studied in three groups; A. arborescens sp.-grp., A. tenuissima sp.-grp., and A. alternata sp.-grp. However, when these characters were simultaneously analysed with molecular data, no clearly separated groups were obtained. Haplotype network and phylogenetic analysis (both Bayesian and maximum parsimony) of a conserved region yielded the same result, suggesting that all isolates belong to the same species. Furthermore, no correlation could be established between morphological speciesgroups and a metabolite or group of metabolites synthesized. Thus, the whole set of analyses carried out in the present work supports the hypothesis that these small-spored Alternaria isolates from food belong to the same species. Identification at species level through classical morphology or modern molecular techniques seems not to be a useful tool to predict toxicological risk in food matrices. The detection of any small-spored Alternaria from Section Alternaria (D.P. Lawr., Gannibal, Peever & B.M. Pryor 2013) in food implies a potential toxicological risk.

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