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Species in the genus Aspergillus are saprophytic filamentous fungi that are most commonly found in soil and litter environments of subtropical and warm temperate latitudes [1]. Inhalation of asexual spores produced by Aspergillus fumigatus and a few other species in the genus cause a group of diseases collectively referred to as aspergillosis [2]. The most severe form of aspergillosis is invasive aspergillosis, which primarily affects individuals with compromised immune systems or preexisting lung conditions [3]. Since drugs targeting invasive aspergillosis are not always effective due to our lack of understanding of how they function inside the human host [4] and the evolution of drug resistance [5, 6], infected individuals suffer high morbidity and mortality [7]. Collectively, Aspergillus fungi affect millions of patients and cause hundreds of thousands of life-threatening infections every year [8, 9]. Not all pathogenic Aspergillus species exhibit the same infection rates [10, 11]. Approximately 70% of all Aspergillus infections are caused by A. fumigatus, whereas the remaining 30% of infections stem from other species in the genus [12]. Some of these other pathogenic species–for example, Aspergillus flavus, Aspergillus niger, and Aspergillus terreus–are distantly related to A. fumigatus [12]; each of these three species belong to different Aspergillus sections (note “section” is a taxonomic rank in-between the genus and species ranks) and show extensive genomic divergence [13]. However, there are also pathogenic Aspergillus species, such as Aspergillus lentulus and Aspergillus udagawae, that belong to the same section as A. fumigatus (section Fumigati) and are much more closely related [14–16]. In contrast, the vast majority of Aspergillus species, including many close relatives of the pathogens mentioned above, are either not pathogenic or very rarely cause disease [16, 17]. Interestingly, A. fumigatus and a few other species in the genus can also cause opportunistic infections, mainly in other mammals and birds, and occasionally in other vertebrates and invertebrates [18]. Even though a great deal is known about some aspects of A. fumigatus pathogenicity [2, 19, 20], we have only recently begun to examine why pathogenicity varies so dramatically across the entire genus and the traits and genetic elements that contributed to this variation. Addressing this question requires that we consider the fact that pathogenic Aspergillus species are not

Evolving moldy murderers: Aspergillus section Fumigati as a model for studying the repeated evolution of fungal pathogenicity