Research Progress in Genomics and Multi-omics of Entomopathogenic Fungi

Entomopathogenic fungi are important biocontrol resources. The entomopathogenic fungi are used to control agricultural pests, which has the advantages of not easy to produe resistance, but easy to cause epidemics of insect diseases, ecological safety and environmental protection, etc. The promotion and application of entomopathogenic fungi to control pests is a development trend of ecological agriculture in the future. The rapid development of contemporary sequencing technology has promoted the research of fungal genomics, and has achieved significant results in the research fields such as whole-genome sequencing, phylogenetic genomics, comparative genomics, and multi-omics including transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics analysis. This article reviews the latest genomics studies on the entomopathogenic fungi such as Beauveria spp., Metarhizium spp., Ophiocordyceps sinensis, Cordyceps militaris etc., combined with the research work of our team to make a summary, involving the use of genomics and multi-omics to jointly reveal the intra- and inter-species evolution of entomopathogenic fungi, changes in host range, identification of effector proteins during infection, synthesis of fungal metabolites, fungal infection mechanism, insect immune mechanism, and fungal-insect interaction mechanism, etc., and explores the future development of entomopathogenic fungi genomics, which will provide scientific basis for future biological control applications.