Entomopathogenic fungus Verticillium lecanii is a promising whitefly and aphid control agent. Chitinases secreted by this insect pathogen have considerable importance in the biological control of some insect pests. An endochitinase gene Vlchit1 from the fungus was cloned and overexpressed in Escherichia coli. The Vlchit1 gene not only contains an open reading frame (ORF) which encodes a protein...

The entomopathogenic fungus Verticillium lecanii is a well-known biocontrol agent of fungal phytopathogens, as well as insect pests. A 42-kDa chitinase belonging to family 18 of the glycosyl hydrolases was isolated and partially characterized. Chitinase was purified using successive column chromatography on phenyl-sepharose, DEAE-sepharose, and CM-sepharose. The enzyme showed the highest activi...

program, we systematically investigated the diversity of metabolites in Deuteromycota, Beauveria bassiana, Metarhizium anisopliae, Nomuraea rileyi, Paecilomyces fumosoroseus and Verticillium lecanii, which have been isolated from the corpses of insects. Comparative study of the HPLC elution pattern among fungal metabolites found that a strain, Beauveria bassiana EPF-5, produced two novel metabo...

Detecting the presence and amount of a fungus in leaf tissue, especially when it is suspected that other fungi are presen~, is quite difficult. Culture methods can be unreliable because a few spores of a fast growing fungus may overgrow other fungi within a, few days (e.g. McKENZIE and HUDSON 1976). Methods which measure the chitin content of fungal walls cannot differentiate between fungi; in ...

Isolates of Exophiala jeanselmei have been classified into 15 types based on their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Thirteen of the 15 types and E. spinifera, which has been classified as E. jeanselmei Type 14, were confirmed to be also clearly differentiated by restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) in internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of ribosomal RNA genes in their nuclear DNA (nD...