Abstract
Botryosphaeriaceae, as a major family of the largest class of kingdom fungi Dothideomycetes, encompasses phytopathogens, saprobes, and endophytes. Many members of this family are opportunistic phytopathogens with a wide host range and worldwide geographical distribution, and can infect many economically important plants, including food crops and raw material plants for biofuel production. To date, however, little is known about the family evolutionary characterization, mating strategies, and pathogenicity-related genes variation from a comparative genome perspective. Here, we conducted a large-scale whole-genome comparison of 271 Dothideomycetes, including 19 species in Botryosphaeriaceae. The comparative genome analysis provided a clear classification of Botryosphaeriaceae in Dothideomycetes and indicated that the evolution of lifestyle within Dothideomycetes underwent four major transitions from non-phytopathogenic to phytopathogenic. Mating strategies analysis demonstrated that at least 3 transitions were found within Botryosphaeriaceae from heterothallism to homothallism. Additionally, pathogenicity-related genes contents in different genera varied greatly, indicative of genus-lineage expansion within Botryosphaeriaceae. These findings shed new light on evolutionary traits, mating strategies and pathogenicity-related genes variation of Botryosphaeriaceae.
Highlights
Dothideomycetes represents the largest and most important class of ascomycete fungi, including 23 orders, 110 families, 1,261 genera, and 19,000 species (Wijayawardene et al, 2017)
All assembled genomes have a high completeness with an average of 94.8 ± 4.3%, and the similar result was found in genome annotations
By comparing the Pfam annotations of B. dothidea and B. kuwatsukai secretory proteins, we found that ribonuclease, the cerato-platanin family, and cysteine-rich secretory protein (CAP) family were only present in B. kuwatsukai, while the cell wall integrity and stress response component (WSC) domain, a putative carbohydrate binding domain was only present in B. dothidea (Supplementary Table 11)
Summary
Dothideomycetes represents the largest and most important class of ascomycete fungi, including 23 orders, 110 families, 1,261 genera, and 19,000 species (Wijayawardene et al, 2017). The members of Dothideomycetes comprise both phytopathogenic (Ohm et al, 2012) and non-phytopathogenic fungi with diverse lifestyles (Ruibal et al, 2009) as well as many mycorrhizal fungi (Peter et al, 2016). Among these 110 families, Botryosphaeriaceae is an important and distinctive family. The host range of this family is very wide, and many economically important plants worldwide can be infected by them (Slippers and Wingfield, 2007). These pathogenic fungi can infect plants through wounds or natural openings, such as lenticels and stomata.
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