COVID-19 Associated Pulmonary Aspergillosis isolates exhibit high genomic heterogeneity

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) continues to be a global health issue and superinfections involving fungi have widely been reported in patients with severe cases of this novel disease. COVID-19-associated pulmonary aspergillosis (CAPA) is one of such superinfections and while many CAPA fungal isolates have been reported, there is a dearth of publicly available whole genome sequences for those isolates. We set out to increase the number of whole genome sequences of CAPA isolates available to the community and characterize those isolates using both phylogenomic and phenotypic analyses. These results will likely be of great interest to molecular biologists, as well as clinicians and epidemiologists as they continue to address the fungal disease implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.