Sequence alignments were conduced with the CLUSTAL W program (43). The alignment was then optimized manually. Nucleotide divergences were estimated using the Kimura's two-parameter method (17), excluding gaps and equivocal sites with the DNADIST program implemented in the PHYLIP package, version 3.5 (8). Phylogenetic inference was performed by the neighbor-joining (NJ) method (34) with the NEIGHBOR program from the PHYLIP package. Relative support for particular clades in the NJ tree was estimated by using 1,000 replications of the bootstrap procedure (7), performed with the SEQBOOT, DNADIST, and NEIGHBOR programs from the PHYLIP package. Fusarium