Comparing virulence of North American Beauveria brongniartii and commercial pathogenic fungi against Asian longhorned beetles Tarryn A. Goble a,⇑ , Stephen A. Rehner b , Stefan J. Long a , Sana Gardescu a , Ann E. Hajek a a Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-2601, USA b USDA-ARS, Systematic Mycology and Microbiology Laboratory, 10300 Baltimore Ave, Beltsville, MD 20705, USA highlights  DNA analysis showed strain NBL 851 is Beauveria asiatica, unlike North American Beauveria brongniartii.  Commercial NBL 851 and Metarhizium F52 were more effective than B. brongniartii in bioassays.  This is the first time B. brongniartii from North America were evaluated for their virulence against an invasive insect pest. graphical abstract article info Article history: Received 31 October 2013 Accepted 12 February 2014 Available online 22 February 2014 Keywords: Microbial control Entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria asiatica Metarhizium brunneum Bioassay Inoculation technique abstract In the USA, the development and field application of Beauveria brongniartii (Sacc.) Petch (Hypocreales: Cla- vicipitaceae) to control the invasive Asian longhorned beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis (Motschulsky) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) have been hampered because it was unknown whether this fungal species is native to North America. With the recent confirmation of the occurrence of B. brongniartii in North America there is renewed interest in this species, particularly as it is an effective pathogen of cerambycids in Japan. However, based on partial sequences of the nuclear intergenic BLOC region the commercially available B. brongniartii strain NBL 851 (Idemitsu Kosan, Tokyo, Japan) belongs instead to the species Beauveria asiatica Rehner and Humber. Further, bioassays using two inoculation methods confirmed that commercially avail- able strains of B. asiatica (NBL 851) and Metarhizium brunneum (F52) (Hypocreales: Clavicipitaceae) were significantly more virulent and resulted in lower median survival times (9.5–7.5 d) of A. glabripennis adults than two North American B. brongniartii isolates (ARSEF 6215 and ARSEF 10279) (24–31 d). The virulence of North American B. brongniartii isolates is not well-documented in the literature. To our best knowledge this is the first account of the virulence of native North American B. brongniartii being evaluated for biological control of any invasive insect pest. Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Several studies have reported results from bioassays of entomo- pathogenic Hypocreales, particularly the species Beauveria bassiana (Bals-Criv.) Vuill., Beauveria brongniartii (Sacc.) Petch and Metarhiz- ium brunneum Petch (formerly M. anisopliae (Metsch.) Sorokin) against invasive Asian longhorned beetles, Anoplophora glabripen- nis (Motschulsky) (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae; ALB) (Dubois et al., 2004, 2008; Hajek et al., 2007). The application of M. brunneum (F52) as fungal bands for biological control of A. glabripennis has been tested in the laboratory in the USA (Shanley et al., 2009; http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biocontrol.2014.02.006 1049-9644/Ó 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: tazgoble@gmail.com (T.A. Goble). Biological Control 72 (2014) 91–97 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Biological Control journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ybcon