A Reliable Assay to Evaluate the Virulence of Aspergillus nidulans Using the Alternative Animal Model Galleria mellonella (Lepidoptera)

Abstract

The greater wax moth Galleria mellonella has emerged as an effective heterologous host to study fungal pathogenesis and the efficacy of promising antifungal drugs (Mylonakis et al., 2005; Li et al., 2013). Here, a methodology describing the Aspergillus nidulans infection in G. mellonella larvae, along with insect survival analysis, is reported. This protocol allowed the distinction between virulent A. nidulans strains (such as TNO2A3), which induced high larval mortality rates, to those in which gene deletion was accompanied by reduced pathogenicity such as ∆gcsA and ∆sdeA (Fernandes et al., 2016).