Taxonomy of Aspergillus series Versicolores: Species reduction and lessons learned about intraspecific variability

Aspergillus series Versicolores members occur in a wide range of environments and substrates such as indoor environments, food, clinical materials, soil, caves, marine or hypersaline ecosystems. The taxonomy of the series has undergone numerous re-arrangements including a drastic reduction in the number of species and subsequent recovery to 17 species in the last decade. The identification to species level is however problematic or impossible in some isolates even using DNA sequencing or MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry indicating a problem in the definition of species boundaries. To revise the species limits, we assembled a large dataset of 518 strains. From these, a total of 213 strains were selected for the final analysis according to their calmodulin (CaM) genotype, substrate and geography. This set was used for phylogenetic analysis based on five loci (benA, CaM, RPB2, Mcm7, Tsr1). Apart from the classical phylogenetic methods, we used multispecies coalescence (MSC) model-based methods,..., ,

Versicolores类群曲霉（Aspergillus series Versicolores）广泛栖息于多样生境与基质中，涵盖室内环境、食品、临床样本、土壤、洞穴、海洋或高盐生态系统。该类群的分类学地位历经多次修订调整，包括物种数量的大幅缩减，近十年间最终确定为17个物种。然而部分分离株即便采用DNA测序或基质辅助激光解吸电离飞行时间质谱（MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry）技术，仍难以或无法完成物种水平鉴定，这反映出该类群的物种边界定义存在争议。为修订该类群的物种界定标准，我们构建了包含518株菌株的大型数据集。据此，我们依据钙调蛋白（calmodulin, CaM）基因型、基质来源与地理分布，从中筛选出213株菌株用于最终分析。该菌株集被用于基于5个基因座（benA、CaM、RPB2、Mcm7、Tsr1）的系统发育分析。除经典系统发育分析方法外，我们还采用了基于多物种溯祖（multispecies coalescence, MSC）模型的分析方法……