Bacteria associated with Agrilus biguttatus sampled from English oak displaying symptoms of acute oak decline. Agrilus biguttatus associated bacteria

Acute oak decline is a syndrome affecting native oak trees in Britain. Agrilus biguttatus are consistently associated with symptomatic trees. As previous studies have shown the potential of beetles to act as vectors for specific bacteria (Vasanthakumar et al., 2008) the work reported here investigates the bacterial assemblages associated with different life stages of A. biguttatus. This is a first step to determining the potential of the beetles to transmit and / or vector pathogenic bacterial species implicated in causing the syndrome.