Introduced bark and ambrosia beetles can be a real problem when they bring fungal symbionts that are also plant pathogens (think Dutch Elm Disease, Laural Wilt, etc). Native trees just don’t have the co-evolutionary history to defend themselves against such novel pathogens. That’s why we need to be able to quickly and accurately identify the true symbionts of these beetles before they arrive, amidst a cacophony of incidental interlopers. Our new paper in Microbial Ecology provides a case study of how replicated quantitative culture-based sampling and permutations-based statistics can separate the moldy chaff from fungal symbiont wheat.
Read it here- Skelton2018
