FungANI, a BLAST-based program for analyzing average nucleotide identity (ANI) between two fungal genomes, enables easy fungal species delimitation

Fungal species delimitation and phylogeny will likely rely in the future upon whole genome sequence comparison, as the costs of such sequences are rapidly decreasing. Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI) between genomes is a convenient metric that can be rapidly calculated for species delimitation. However, there is presently no easy-to-use program calculating the ANI between two fungal genomes and providing easy-to interpret results that can be help mycologists having limited access to bioinformatic facilities. Here, we present FungANI, a customizable BLAST-based program that calculate ANI between genomes. The program primarily targets Linux workstations or servers but it can be run on the latest Windows, macOS and Linux 64-Bit operating systems as a standalone desktop application. It was tested with various publicly-available genomes from species belonging to the Sordariales order. It proved efficient to differentiate closely related species and retrace their possible phylogenetic relationships. However, FungANI did not perform well for phylogenetic reconstruction on a broader evolutionary scale such as inferring relationships between distant genera. The program is freely available at https://github.com/podo-gec/fungani.