Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have significantly enhanced the accuracy of phylogenetic inference, enabling comprehensive genome-wide analyses. Fusarium fungi, which include numerous agriculturally and medically important species, are typically classified at the species complex (SC) level. Clarifying the evolutionary relationships and distinctiveness of these SCs is therefore essential for accurate identification and understanding of their biology. Recent large-scale phylogenetic studies based on genomic data have provided a more resolved understanding of the evolutionary relationships among Fusarium SCs, supporting the view that most represent evolutionarily coherent and stable lineages. However, the phylogenetic position of Fusarium commune has not been explicitly examined, despite incongruence between phylogenies inferred from nucleotide and amino acid sequence data. This study aimed to clarify the phylogenetic placement of F. commune at the SC level by re-examining its position using a genome dataset independent of those employed in previous studies. Our results are largely consistent with previously reported genome-scale phylogenetic analyses of the genus Fusarium and support the stability of most SCs. However, F. commune was not clearly included in any of the currently recognized SCs and instead formed an independent lineage. These findings provide insights into the evolutionary history of Fusarium SCs and contribute to a better understanding of the taxonomic position of F. commune.
Nozawa et al. (Thu,) studied this question.