Fig 1.
Stages of A. apis colonization of abdominal tissue of B. vosnesenskii.
(A) Healthy tissues. (B) Near complete colonization with cleistothecia (darkened areas) visible. (C) Complete colonization; internal organs no longer visible. (D) Internal spore balls visible in cleistothecia (400X).
Fig 2.
Phylogeny of the internal transcribed spacer region for selected Ascosphaera species.
The phylogeny was inferred under both the maximum likelihood methodology in RAxML and Bayesian methodology in MrBayes using the GTRGAMMA model of evolution. 1,000 RAxML bootstrap replicates were used and MrBayes was run for 1,000,000 generations with 1000 sample points. Bayesian posterior probabilities (PP) greater than 0.70 and Bootstrap support (BS) values greater than 50 are shown for major phylogram branches (PP/BS). Genbank accession numbers precede taxon name for those sequences that were derived from Genbank. Taxa denoted in bold face as “fungal culture” represent novel sequence data from this study that are derived from cultures of Ascosphaera apis isolated from bumble bee queens. Fungal culture A1 has been deposited at the USDA ARSEF insect pathogen collection (culture ID ST-OR11-A1) and the ITS sequence for this culture is deposited in Genbank (accession #KJ158165). Sequences for Aspergillus terreus and Ascosphaera apis USDA-ARSEF 7405 were derived from the genome sequences available at http://www.aspgd.org and http://www.beebase.org.