RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Ecological speciation within the Phytophthora genus JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 096842 DO 10.1101/096842 A1 M. F. Mideros A1 D. A. Turissini A1 N. Guayazán A1 G. Danies A1 M. Cárdenas A1 K. Myers A1 J. Tabima A1 E. M. Goss A1 A. Bernal A1 L. E. Lagos A1 A. Grajales A1 L. N. Gonzalez A1 D. E. L. Cooke A1 W. E. Fry A1 N. Grünwald A1 D. R. Matute A1 S. Restrepo YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/28/096842.abstract AB Over the past few years, symptoms akin to late blight disease have been reported on a variety of crop plants in South America. Despite the economic importance of these crops, the causal agents of the diseases belonging to the genus Phytophthora have not been completely characterized. In this study, we used an integrative approach that leveraged morphological, ecological, and genetic approaches to explore cryptic speciation within P. infestans sensu lato. We described a new Phytophthora species collected in Colombia from tree tomato (Solanum betaceum), a semi-domesticated fruit. All morphological traits and population genetic analyses, using microsatellite data and a reduced representation of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data, support the description of the new species, Phytophthora betacei sp. nov. We have demonstrated that ecological differences are important in the persistence of P. infestans and P. betacei as genetically isolated units across an overlapping area in the northern Andes.