THE FUNGUSTRICHOPHYTON REDELLIISP. NOV. CAUSES SKIN INFECTIONS THAT RESEMBLE WHITE-NOSE SYNDROME OF HIBERNATING BATS

Abstract

Understanding the evolutionary history of living organisms is a central problem in biology. Until recently the ability to infer evolutionary relationships was limited by the amount of DNA sequence data available, but new DNA sequencing technologies have largely removed this limitation. As a result, DNA sequence data are readily available or obtainable for a wide spectrum of organisms, thus creating an unprecedented opportunity to explore evolutionary relationships broadly and deeply across the Tree of Life. Unfortunately, the algorithms used to infer evolutionary relationships are NP-hard, so the dramatic increase in available DNA sequence data has created a commensurate increase in the need for access to powerful computational resources. Local laptop or desktop machines are no longer viable for analysis of the larger data sets available today, and progress in the field relies upon access to large, scalable high-performance computing resources. This paper describes development of the CIPRES Science Gateway, a web portal designed to provide researchers with transparent access to the fastest available community codes for inference of phylogenetic relationships, and implementation of these codes on scalable computational resources. Meeting the needs of the community has included developing infrastructure to provide access, working with the community to improve existing community codes, developing infrastructure to insure the portal is scalable to the entire systematics community, and adopting strategies that make the project sustainable by the community. The CIPRES Science Gateway has allowed more than 1800 unique users to run jobs that required 2.5 million Service Units since its release in December 2009. (A Service Unit is a CPUhour at unit priority).

Prelude to a panzootic: Gene flow and immunogenetic variation in northern little brown myotis vulnerable to bat white-nose syndrome

“…The lack of regional MHC differentiation in M. lucifugus across its northern range suggests that disease-related selective pressures on this species may be similar among genetically differentiated clusters, but testing this hypothesis requires more robust genetic tools that can differentiate among duplicated loci, and that can simultaneously target multiple immune genes. Bats in our sampling area coexist with a variety of pathogens including several strains of bat rabies (Middleton et al 2015), corona and polyoma viruses (Misra et al 2009), endemic fungal pathogens such as Trichophyton redelli (Lorch et al 2015), internal parasites such as Trypanosoma myoti (Bower and Woo 1981), and ectoparasites such as fleas and mites (Webber et al 2015). Most of these are relatively widespread, affecting bats across North America.…”

White-nose syndrome restructures bat skin microbiomes

“…Commensal fungi do occasionally grow on bats (e.g. Lorch et al, 2015), but Pd appears to have adapted from an environmental microbe living in cave soils and sediments to a pathogen that is able to utilize bat skin as a food source (Palmer, Drees, Foster, & Lindner, 2018). This was not the case for bacterial species, however, as there were significant differences in diversity between bats and substrates with substrate samples showing higher Shannon diversity.…”

Detecting viable Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Ascomycota: Pseudeurotiaceae) from walls

“…However, Martinkova et al (2010) cultured Pd on SAB from only 33.3 % (n ¼ 48) of swabs taken directly from European bats with visible white fungal growth. This may reflect decreased growth of Pd on European bats compared to infected bats in North America, or possibly the observed growth on some bats was of a different fungal species than Pd (such as Trichophyton spp., Lorch et al, 2015).…”