The three strains of sub-group 2 were isolated from Oceania (one from Australia and two from Papua New Guinea). To these, an Indian (Cfa), a Chinese (Cfa) and a Spanish (Csa) strain were also added, i.e., fungal strains from regions with temperate humid subtropic and Mediterranean

selleck inhibitor climates, resembling the climate of the Oceanic Cfa [41]. Sub-groups 3 and 4 consisted almost exclusively of European strains (9 and 3, respectively) from regions with Mediterranean climate, such as Spain, Portugal and Italy. On the other hand, 12 strains from regions of Europe with maritime temperate climates (Cfb) formed a well-supported group (87 and 92% NJ and MP bootstrap and 94% PP support) presented as sub-group 6. All nine strains of sub-group 5 were from regions with dry arid, semiarid (BSh, BSk and BWk) and temperate (Csa and Csb) climates in Asia and Europe, while the South American (6)

from tropic (Af, Am and Aw) and dry arid/semiarid (BSh) climates may be named as sub-group 7. Figure 6 Grouping of B. bassiana sensu lato strains (Clade Α) as well as Clade C and A 2 , according to their geographic distribution, climate conditions and molecular data (concatenated OSI-027 datasets from ITS1-5.8S-ITS2, nad 3- atp 9 and atp 6- rns ). The 3 symbol Köppen-Geiger climate classification is as shown in Fig. 5. Discussion Fungal mt genome size shows high divergence among the Pezizomycotina, ranging from 100.3 Kb for Podospora anserina (NC_001329) to 24.5 Kb for the entomopathogen Lecanicillium muscarium (AF487277). Beauveria mt genomes sizes were similar to those of other Sitaxentan fungi of the order Hypocreales, e.g., Fusarium oxysporum (34.5 Kb; AY945289) and Hypocrea jecorina (42.1 Kb; NC_003388), but they were significantly larger (~40%) than the mt genomes of the other two known entomopathogenic fungi of the order, i.e., M. anisopliae (24.7 kb) [27] and L. muscarium (24.5 kb) [42].

Since the Beauveria mtDNAs contained the same protein and rRNA coding genes -also identical in sizes- with all above mt genomes, their larger sizes can be attributed to more introns and to longer intergenic regions. Compared to mt genomes of plants and animals, fungal mt genomes are significantly richer in group I and II introns [43]. Divergence in intron content is a common feature among mt genomes of Pezizomycotina. At one extreme is the mt genome of P. anserina which contains 41 introns [44] and at the other are several fungi that contain a single intron in the rnl genes of their mt genomes (i.e., L. muscarium and M. anisopliae). The recently released mt genome of another B. bassiana isolate (EU371503) also presented fewer introns than the genomes that we analyzed. These data support and extend previous evidence for intronic variability among strains of the same Beauveria species [14, 16].