摘要：The entomopathogenic fungi are currently used as one of the most effective biocontrol agents to sup-press outbreaks of economically important forest pests, such as Ips typographus. Beauveria bassiana is actively used in biocontrol worldwide and it was rec-ognised in more than 700 insect host species so far. However, its occurrence in nature remains unclear. Therefore,a confirmation of the presence of this fun-gus in nature could improve the efficiency ofbiolog-ical agents for targeting species. In this study.B.bas-siana was confirmed based on morphological and molecular data for the first time in a natural popula-tion of I.typographus in spruce forest stands of Ser-bia. The morphological analysis indicated that my-celia cultivated from collected bark beetles paramet-rically correspond to B. bassiana and this assumption was also confirmed by molecular methods based on ITS nuclear DNA markers. The phylogenetic assess-ment showed that Serbian isolates belong to the clade B.bassiana sensu lato and group with Mediter-ranean countries Italy and Spain climatically cover-ing mainly dry arid and semi-arid steppes of low lat-itude climatic regions.
