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Molecular Plant Breeding 2012, Vol.3, No.7, 63
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79
http://mpb.sophiapublisher.com
63
Research Report Open Access
Entomopathogenic Fungi as Microbial Biocontrol Agent
Sehroon Khan , Lihua Guo , Yushanjiang Maimaiti , Mahmut Mijit , Dewen Qiu
Key Laboratory of Integrated Pest Management in Crops, Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of Plant Protection, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
(CAAS), Beijing, P.R. China
Corresponding authors email:
qiudewen@caas.net.cn;
Authors
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2012, Vol.3, No.7 doi: 10.5376/mpb.2012.03.0007
Received: 25 Apr., 2012
Accepted: 11 May, 2012
Published: 20 May, 2012
This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestric ted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Preferred citation for this article:
Khan et al., 2012, Entomopathogenic Fungi as Microbial Biocontrol Agent, Molecular Plant Breeding, Vol.3, No.7 63
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79 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2012.03.0007)
Abstract
An attractive alternative method to chemical pesticides is the microbial biocontrol (MBCAs) agents. They are the natural
enemies devastating the pest population with no hazard effects on human health and the environment. Entomopathogenic fungi has
an important position among all the biocontrol agents because of its route of pathogenicity, broad host rang and its ability to cont rol
both sap sucking pests such as mosquitoes and aphids as well as pests with chewing mouthparts, yet they only cover a small
percentage of the total insecticide market. Improvements are needed to fulfill the requirements for high market share.
Entomopathogenic fungi differ from other microorganisms in their infection process: they directly breach the cuticle to enter the
insect hemocoel, while other microorganisms enter by ingestion through mouth and then cause disease. Insect cuticle is mainly
composed of chitin and protein surrounded by wax, lipid layer or fatty acids. Fungal pathogenesis mainly starts with the secretion of
cuticle degrading enzymes. Some important and well known cuticle degrading enzymes are chitinase, protease and lipase which can
degrade chitin, protein and lipid of the cuticle, respectively. In this review we collected literatures from different sources and we
arranged them in a such a way to better to understand the process of insect pathogenicity of entomopathogenic fungi and to fi nd ways
to improve the virulence of wild strain fungi to shorten the killing time of the pest and to commercialize the entomopathogenic fungi.
In this way, the market share of the fungal entomopathogenic fungi will increase and a decrease in the usage of synthetic chemical
pesticides will automatically follow.
Keywords
Entomopathogenic fungi;
Beauveria bassiana
; Biocontrol agents; Enzymes; Pathogenesis
Background
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) involves ins-
pection, identification and treatment of pests. The
treatment (when required) is carried out after inspection
and identification with an environmentally safe and
pest specific pesticide with limited persistence. Therefore
biological pest management is considered as an
important part of IPM. Biological control is an
important part of integrated pest management (IPM).
According to Oerke and Dehne (2004), insect pests
are responsible for an estimated 42% of all losses in
crop production. Extensive use of synthetic chemical
pesticides, insecticide resistance to chemical pesticides
(Ffrench-Constant et al., 2004), the resulting environ-
mental pollution, adverse effects on human health and
other organisms and the demand for reduced chemical
inputs in agriculture have provided an impetus to the
development of alternative forms of pest control
(Wilson and Tisdall, 2001). An attractive alternative
method to chemical pesticides is biocontrol (Nicholson,
2007) and the microbial biocontrol (MBCAs) agents
as the natural enemies of the pest population devastate
pests with no hazard effects on human health and
environment. As the microbial biocontrol agents have
complex mode of action, it’s very difficult for a pest to
develop resistance against MBCAs. The present
MBCAs are viruses, bacteria, nematodes, and fungi
and they are used throughout the world with great
advantage and success. But fungal biocontrol agents
are the most important among all the MBCAs due to
easy delivery, improving formulation, vast number of
pathogenic strains known, easy engineering techniques
and over-expression of endogenous proteins or exo-
genous toxins (St. Leger et al., 1996; Butt et al., 2001;
Wang and St. Leger, 2007; Federici et al., 2008; St.
Leger and Wang, 2010). Similarly, the entomopathogenic