Are there differences between F. musae strains isolated from banana fruits and humans?

Fusarium musae is a pathogenic species belonging to the Fusarium fujikuroi species complex. It has been described for the first time in 2011 as pathogen of banana fruits, but recent studies demonstrated that it can also invade human patients, where it causes keratitis and skin infections as well as systemic infections in immunocompromised patients. Given the ability of this novel species to cause infection in different pathosystems, a set of experiment was carried out to look at the diversity of the strains coming from the two different hosts. A collection of 19 F. musae strains isolated worldwide from both banana fruits and human patients was built. Plant and human strains presented morphological and taxonomic identity. The entire collection was also used to study the virulence of each strain using in vivo infection models for both banana fruits and Galleria mellonella (chosen as “human proxy”). Banana and human strains are potentially able to invade both pathosystems causing comparable level of infection with some samples with significant diversity in virulence. The development of labelled strains is ongoing to decipher the mechanism of host pathogen interaction. Moreover, a chromosome level complete genome was assembled to be used as reference for whole genome and mitochondrial comparison. Geographic diversity and host specificity are currently explored in the light of genomic variations.