Anses, INRAE, Ecole nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, UMR BIPAR, Laboratoire de Santé Animale, Maisons-Alfort, F-94700, France.
Unité de Biologie Cellulaire des Trypanosomes, Département de Parasitologie et Insectes Vecteurs, Institut Pasteur Paris,France.
Ticks Tick Borne Dis. 2021 Sep;12(5):101732. doi: 10.1016/j.ttbdis.2021.101732. Epub 2021 May 3.
Establishing and maintaining tick colonies in the laboratory is essential for studying their biology and pathogen transmission, or for the development of new tick control methods. Due to their requirement for very high humidity, these laboratory-bred colonies are frequently subject to fungal contamination. In the present study, we aimed to identify the fungal species that contaminated a laboratory-reared colony of Ixodes ricinus through microscopic observation and molecular identification. We identified three different taxa isolated from the ticks: Aspergillus parasiticus, Penicillium steckii, and Scopulariopsis brevicaulis. These three species are usually regarded as environmental saprophytic molds but both direct and indirect evidence suggest that they could also be considered as entomopathogenic fungi. Although we do not have any direct evidence that the fungi isolated from I. ricinus in this study could cause lethal infections in ticks, we observed that once infected, heavy fungal growth coupled with very high mortality rates suggest that studying the entomopathogenic potential of these fungi could be relevant to biological tick control.
建立和维持实验室中的蜱虫群体对于研究它们的生物学和病原体传播，或开发新的蜱虫控制方法至关重要。由于它们对高湿度的要求，这些实验室培育的群体经常受到真菌污染。在本研究中，我们旨在通过微观观察和分子鉴定来确定污染实验室饲养的硬蜱（Ixodes ricinus）群体的真菌种类。我们从蜱虫中分离出三种不同的分类群：寄生曲霉（Aspergillus parasiticus）、石青霉（Penicillium steckii）和短帚霉（Scopulariopsis brevicaulis）。这三个物种通常被认为是环境腐生真菌，但直接和间接证据表明，它们也可以被视为昆虫病原真菌。虽然我们没有任何直接证据表明本研究中从硬蜱（Ixodes ricinus）中分离出的真菌能够导致蜱虫致命感染，但我们观察到，一旦感染，大量真菌生长加上非常高的死亡率表明，研究这些真菌的昆虫病原潜力可能与生物蜱虫控制有关。
