Root isolations of Metarhizium spp. from crops reflect diversity in the soil and indicate no plant specificity

Persistence of Brazilian isolates of the entomopathogenic fungi Metarhizium anisopliae and M. robertsii in strawberry crop soil after soil drench application

“…So far, most characterized isolates originating from insect hosts in Brazil belong to the M. anisopliae Mani2 clade (Rezende et al, 2015), including the inoculated isolate ESALQ1037 of the present study. The apparent soil-based ecology of M. robertsii also included recovery from plant roots as has been reported in other studies (Behie et al, 2012;Steinwender et al, 2015).…”

“…Molecular markers with high discriminatory power are required for identification of individual fungal isolates, for instance when studying behavior and fate of an applied isolate in the field. Simple sequence repeats (SSR or microsatellite markers) have proven to be very useful for consistent and explicit assessment of isolate identity and persistence (Pilz et al, 2011;Kepler et al, 2015;Mayerhofer et al, 2015a,b;Steinwender et al, 2014Steinwender et al, , 2015. On the other hand, analyses of DNA sequence and subsequent comparison with sequences of references strains are used to determine species affiliation.…”

“…On the other hand, analyses of DNA sequence and subsequent comparison with sequences of references strains are used to determine species affiliation. In the genus Metarhizium the gene translation elongation factor 1-a and the MzFG543igs intergenic region are the loci targeted for such purposes (Kepler et al, 2015;Steinwender et al, 2014Steinwender et al, , 2015.…”

Ants express risk-adjusted sanitary care

“…Social insect colonies face a high load [42] and diversity [43, 44] of pathogens in their environment, making multiple infections of individual colony members likely. Given the observed costs of increased susceptibility to heterologous pathogens after a previous, otherwise asymptomatic micro-infection, we expect selection to act on ants to avoid super-infections with detrimental heterologous pathogens.…”

“…We used the entomopathogenic fungi Metarhizium and Beauveria , both of which are natural pathogens of Lasius ants [29; C.D.P unpubl., 30] and occur in high density (up to 5000 conidiospores/g soil, [42]) and diversity (many sympatrically occurring species and strains, [43, 44]) in the soil, where the ants nest. Natural infection loads of L. neglectus populations with individual species of these obligate killing pathogens reach up to 9% prevalence [29], with sporulating cadavers each producing approximately 12 Mio new infectious conidiospores (conidia) [20].…”