bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/557140; this version posted February 22, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Genetic and genomic analyses reveal boundaries between species closely related to Cryptococcus pathogens Andrew Ryan Passer1¶, Marco A. Coelho1¶, Robert Blake Billmyre1#a, Minou Nowrousian2, Moritz Mittelbach3#b, Andrey M. Yurkov4, Anna Floyd Averette1, Christina A. Cuomo5, Sheng Sun1*, and Joseph Heitman1* 1 Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina, USA 2 Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Molekulare Botanik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany 3 Geobotany, Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Ruhr-University Bochum, 44801 Bochum, Germany 4 Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, Braunschweig, Germany 5 Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA #aCurrent address: Stowers Institute for Medical Research, Kansas City, Missouri, USA #bCurrent address: Plant Protection Office Berlin, Mohriner Allee 137, 12347 Berlin, Germany * Corresponding authors: Email:
[email protected] (SS) and
[email protected] (JH) ¶These authors contributed equally to this work bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/557140; this version posted February 22, 2019. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Abstract Speciation is a central mechanism of biological diversification. While speciation is well studied in plants and animals, in comparison, relatively little is known about speciation in fungi. One fungal model is the Cryptococcus genus, which is best known for the pathogenic Cryptococcus neoformans/Cryptococcus gattii species complex that causes over 200,000 new infections in humans annually.