Active and Covert Infections of Cricket Iridovirus and Acheta domesticus Densovirus in Reared Gryllodes sigillatus Crickets.

ABSTRACT: Interest in developing food, feed, and other useful products from farmed insects has gained remarkable momentum in the past decade. Crickets are an especially popular group of farmed insects due to their nutritional quality, ease of rearing, and utility. However, production of crickets as an emerging commodity has been severely impacted by entomopathogenic infections, about which we know little. Here, we identified and characterized an unknown entomopathogen causing mass mortality in a lab-reared population of Gryllodes sigillatus crickets, a species used as an alternative to the popular Acheta domesticus due to its claimed tolerance to prevalent entomopathogenic viruses. Microdissection of sick and healthy crickets coupled with metagenomics-based identification and real-time

SUBMITTER: Duffield KR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8670987 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature