ArticleEcology2025
Insect hosts are nutritional landscapes navigated by fungal pathogens.
Article in Ecology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Harnessing Nutritional Niches to Explore Fungus-Animal Symbioses.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Article
- Biology, classification, and entomopathogen-based management and their mode of action onFrontiers in microbiology · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Nutrition can mediate host-pathogen interactions indirectly when specific deficiencies (e.g., iron or glutamine) constrain host immune performance. Nutrition can also directly govern these interactions as invading pathogens colonize finite landscapes of nutritionally variable host tissues that must be optimally foraged during pathogen development. We first used a conceptual framework of nutritional niches to show that insect-pathogenic Metarhizium fungi navigate host landscapes where different tissues vary widely in (protein [P] and carbohydrates [C]). We next tested whether host-specific Metarhizium species have narrower fundamental nutritional niches (FNNs) than host-generalists by measuring pathogen performance across an in vitro nutritional landscape simulating a within-host foraging environment. We then tested how developing pathogens navigate nutritional landscapes by developing a liquid-media approach to track pathogen intake of P and C over time. Host-specificity did not govern FNN dimensions, as the three tested Metarhizium species: (1) grew maximally across C treatments assuming P was present above a lower threshold, and (2) similarly initiated dispersal behaviors and sporulated when either C or P became depleted. However, specialist and generalist pathogens navigated nutritional landscapes differently. The host specialist (M. acridum) first prioritized C intake, but generalists (M. anisopliae, M. robertsii) prioritized P and C according to their availability. The numbers of known hosts may be insufficient to delimit pathogens as specialists or generalists as diverse hosts do not necessarily comprise diverse nutritional landscapes. Instead, the immune responses of hosts and nutritional niche breadth of pathogens are likely co-equal evolutionary drivers of host specificity.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.