Fungal Identification via MALDI-TOF and ITS Sequencing

All isolates were identified at the species level using matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization–time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) conducted with Autof MS 1000 (Autobio, Zhengzhou, China) and Vitek MS (Bio Merieux, Marcy-l’Étoile, France). The species identification was confirmed via the sequencing of the rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region (ABI 3730XL, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Cleveland, OH, USA). PCR and sequencing of the amplicons were performed using the forward primers, V9G and ITS1 (5′-TCCGTAGGTGAACCTGCGG-3′), and the reverse primers, LS266 and ITS4 (5′-TCCTCCGCTTATTGATATGC-3′) (Zhang et al., 2014 (link); Hou et al., 2016 (link)). The phylogenetic tree of D. catenulata was constructed by alignment with the ITS gene sequences of the common Candida species in the NCBI gene library. Maximum-likelihood phylogenetic trees were constructed with IQ-TREE using an ultrafast bootstrap approximation approach with 1,000 replicates (Trifinopoulos et al., 2016 (link)).