**2. Importance of bamboo ascomycetes**

Cultivation of economically important bamboos is often threatened by fungal infection and diseases which eventually result from serious damages on bamboo cultivation [4]. A number of foliage diseases (e.g., leaf spots and leaf blight) of bamboos have been recorded. However, fungi cause comparatively less damage to bamboo than culm diseases [5]. For example, during 1988–1990, 5300 hectares of bamboos were affected by *Balansia take* (Miyake) Hara which occurred on bamboo culms in Fujian, China. More than 200,000 bamboos were cut down and burned to prevent the pathogen from spreading. However, this caused serious economic losses. In 1960, Hino and Katumoto explained that the relative importance of different diseases affecting bamboos is difficult to assess because of the general lack of information accompanying the disease records [4]. Thus, pathologists have now started paying attention on the research of bamboo pathogens. A book entitled *Diseases of bamboos in Asia: an illustrated manual* listed 122 fungal diseases in Asia region, with 100 records in India and 15 in Thailand [5]. In China, 183 fungal pathogens associated with bamboo were recorded [6, 7]. Numbers of ascomycetous fungi recorded as bamboo pathogens were quite high. However, in the absence of molecular data, most of the fungal names recognized remained artificial. A sizable number of taxa were not even identified up to species level.

*Shiraia bambusicola* Henn. is one of the famous bamboo pathogens because of its medicinal value. The fungus produces large, pinkish ascostromata on living bamboo branches (**Figure 1**). Their fruiting bodies, as a traditional Chinese medicine, are used for curing rheumatoid arthritis [8], as well as extracting the metabolite, hypocrellin [9], which has promising applications

**Figure 1.** Ascostromata of *Shiraia bambusicola* collected from China.

in photodynamic therapy (PDT) [10] and in anticancer treatments [11]. Another well-known Chinese medicinal ascomycete is *Hypocrella bambusae* (Berk. & Broome) Sacc. This fungus produces similar ascostromata with *S. bambusicola* on branches of *Sinarundinaria* spp. Their ascostromata are also used to extract hypocrellin A and hypocrellin B. It is reported that hypocrellin B can be used to evaluate antiviral activity against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) [12]. In China, a costly medicinal unguent named Bamboo Parasitic Fungus Ointment is made of hypocrellin B. *H. bambusae* contains higher hypocrellin than that of *S. bambusicola*. Index Fungorum [13] recorded that the current name of this fungus is *Pseudonectria bambusae* (Berk. & Broome) Höhn. Without the full morphological study and molecular data in GenBank, its taxonomic placement still remains confused. Therefore, the study of taxonomy and phylogeny of bamboo fungi is urgently needed to be carried out to clarify these undetermined and confused taxa.
