Antifungal effect of copper nanoparticles against Fusarium kuroshium, a fungus that forms an obligate symbiosis with Euwallacea kuroshio ambrosia beetle.

Here we describe for the first time, the antifungal activity which Cu-NPs exert against Fusarium kuroshium, a fungus that forms an obligate symbiosis with the Kuroshio shot hole borer (KSHB), an ambrosia beetle that was formally named Euwallacea kuroshio at 2018 (Gomez et al., 2018;M Smith et al., 2019). We analyze both, the response at the molecular level of the fungal once it is growing in presence of Cu-NPs, as well as its changes at the morphological and developmental levels. To meet these goals RNA-seq methodology and field emission scanning electron microscopy were used.Important to mention that genome from strain used (HFEW-16-IV-019) it was previously sequenced and reported as belonging to Fusarium euwallaceae species (Ibarra-Laclette et al., 2017), a Fusarium species associated to with the Polyphagous Shot Hole Borer (PSHB) (Freeman et al., 2013;Sandoval-Denis et al., 2019). Later phylogenetic analysis (Sanchez-Rangel et al., 2018) confirmed that this strain is actually Fusarium kuroshium sp. (O'Donnell et al., 2020). The error in the assignment of the species was because, when the genome was reported, there were not enough molecular data available that allow us to infer the differences between the Fusarium strains associated with KSBH or PSHB, but they were published a little later (Na et al., 2017).