Fig. 6

Analysis of core gene sets of experimentally validated pathogenicity and/or predicted essential-for-life genes reveals lower mutation rates than seen in non-essential genes. The average high and moderate (H/M) mutation rates expressed as a feature of protein lengths (aa) for gene lists encoding proteins which have been; 1—experimentally determined to play no (or very minor) roles in fungal virulence; 2—experimentally determined to play an important role in virulence and; 3—predicted to encode putative essential-for-life genes through orthology to proteins experimentally characterised in Aspergillus fumigatus. Asterisk (*) symbol indicates a statistically significant difference between mutation rates between the indicated gene sets. Gene lists and associated polymorphism data is shown in Additional file 6: Table S4