Functional Analysis of the Two-component Histidine Kinase MaSln1 in Metarhizium acridum

As an environmentally friendly biological insecticide, fungal insecticide has many advantages such as low likelihood to inducing insect resistance and sustainable control, thus exhibiting a great potential in biological control. However, the shortcomings such as high cost, slow speed to kill pests and susceptibility to environmental factors limit their large-scale application. Conidia are the main infection units of entomopathogenic fungi, thus the conidial yield and quality can surely affect the production cost and the control effect of fungal pesticides. Therefore, clarifying the regulation mechanism of the conidial yield and quality in entomopathogenic fungi, is widely expected to provide a theoretical basis for improving the production efficiency of fungal insecticides.Sln1, a conserved sensor kinase in the HOG-MAPK pathway, played different functions in different fungi. In this study, we found that the coding sequence of MaSln1 is 3426 bp, containing an intron of 60 bp, which encodes a protein of 1121 amino acids through bioinformatics analysis in the model entomopathogenic fungus M. acridum. The molecular mass and the isoelectric point are 122.8 kD and 6.88, respectively. The functions of MaSln1 were analyzed in M. acridum through gene knockout and rescue strategies.