Naturally Occurring Aphid–Fungal Associations

Fungi are major component of ecosystems and often provide valuable ecosystem services by infecting insect pests such as aphids, commonly found in both natural and agricultural ecosystems. Here, we explore the diversity of naturally occurring associations between aphids and fungi. We present a unique, curated global database gathered from the literature data using 411 papers published in 8 languages and spanning 167 years of research on aphid–fungus interactions. Using these data, we built an interaction network to review the available information and investigate fungus-host specificity. Our database comprises 2991 unique aphid–fungus associations involving 364 aphid species and 149 fungal species, reported from 86 countries. The predominant interaction type was facultative aphid–pathogenic (51.5%), followed by obligate aphid–pathogenic interactions (43.5%). About 5% of the associations were non-pathogenic and involved fungi in the Ascomycota. The most highly connected aphid species belonged to the subfamily Aphidinae. Our database can serve as a foundation for further investigations dealing with habitat dependency of interactions and predicting infection pathways in real-world agroecosystems.