41st Annual Meeting of the Society for Invertebrate Pathology
and 9th International Conference on Bacillus thuringiensis

A continuing impediment to the study of Beauveria, Metarhizium and other entomopathogenic fungi is the lack of clearly defined species boundaries and taxonomies that recognize the cryptic speciation that has occurred in these taxa. We introduce a publicly available web site, to be hosted at the USDA-ARS Systematic Mycology and Microbiology Laboratory, (Beltsville, MD), that provides standardized species identification resources for Beauveria and Metarhizium. The core of this resource is a searchable BLAST database of sequence records for selected isolates representative of the species diversity of these genera based on recently completed and ongoing molecular systematic revisions. All isolates in the database are vouchered in publicly accessible culture collections. Users input query sequences for one of several phylogenetically informative loci that have been determined for all currently recognized species in Metarhizium and Beauveria (e.g., Metarhizium: EF-1alpha, RPB1&2, B-tubulin; Beauveria: ITS, EF-1alpha, Bloc). Descriptions of conserved PCR and sequencing primers to all diagnostic loci will be available. Complete morphological and molecular species descriptions with images will be provided, as well as keys to species. In the future, the website will be expanded to include additional genera of entomopathogenic fungi, and updated as data for new and revised species are published.