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Concept
Beauveria bassiana
Summary
Beauveria bassiana is a fungus that grows naturally in soils throughout the world and acts as a parasite on various arthropod species, causing white muscardine disease; it thus belongs to the group of entomopathogenic fungi. It is used as a biological insecticide to control a number of pests, including termites, thrips, whiteflies, aphids and various beetles. Its use in the control of bedbugs and malaria-transmitting mosquitos is under investigation.
The species is named after the Italian entomologist Agostino Bassi, who discovered it in 1835 as the cause of the muscardine disease which then led to carriers transmitting it by airborne means, and later the same year it was named Botrytis bassiana by Giuseppe Gabriel Balsamo-Crivelli. In 1911 Jean Beauverie did further study and the next year Jean Paul Vuillemin made it the type species of his new Beauveria. It was formerly also known as Tritirachium shiotae. The name B. bassiana has long been used to describe a species complex of morphologically similar and closely related isolates. Rehner and Buckley have shown that B. bassiana consists of many distinct lineages that should be recognized as distinct phylogenetic species and the genus Beauveria was redescribed with a proposed type for B. bassiana in 2011.
Beauveria bassiana is the anamorph (asexually reproducing form) of Cordyceps bassiana. The latter teleomorph (the sexually reproducing form) has been collected only in eastern Asia.
The insect disease caused by the fungus is a muscardine which has been called white muscardine disease. When the microscopic spores of the fungus come into contact with the body of an insect host, they germinate, penetrate the cuticle, and grow inside, killing the insect within a matter of days. Afterwards, a white mold emerges from the cadaver and produces new spores. A typical isolate of B. bassiana can attack a broad range of insects; various isolates differ in their host range. The factors responsible for host susceptibility are not known.
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