Comparative genomics reveals intra and inter species variation in the pathogenic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis
The Global Pandemic Lineage (GPL) of the amphibian pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) has been described as a main driver of amphibian extinctions on nearly every continent. Near complete genome of three Bd-GPL strains have enabled studies of the pathogen but the genomic features that set Bd-GPL apart from other Bd lineages is not well understood due to a lack of high-quality genome assemblies and annotations from other lineages. We used long-read DNA sequencing to assemble high-quality genomes of three Bd-BRAZIL isolates and one non-pathogen outgroup species Polyrhizophydium stewartii (Ps) strain JEL0888, and compared these to genomes of previously sequenced Bd-GPL strains. The Bd-BRAZIL assemblies range in size between 22.0 and 26.1 Mb and encode 8495-8620 protein-coding genes for each strain. Our pan-genome analysis provided insight into shared and lineage-specific gene content. The core genome of Bd consists of 6278 conserved gene families, with 202 Bd-BRAZIL and 172 Bd-GPL specific gene families. We discovered gene copy number variation in pathogenicity gene families between Bd-BRAZIL and Bd-GPL strains though none were consistently expanded in Bd-GPL or Bd-BRAZIL strains. Comparison within the Batrachochytrium genus and two closely related non-pathogenic saprophytic chytrids identified variation in sequence and protein domain counts. We further test these new Bd-BRAZIL genomes to assess their utility as reference genomes for transcriptome alignment and analysis. Our analysis examines the genomic variation between strains in Bd-BRAZIL and Bd-GPL and offers insights into the application of these genomes as reference genomes for future studies. Overall design: To investigate the effect of reference genome choice when aligning RNA from multiple Bd strains across two lineages