Repeated replacement of an intrabacterial symbiont in the tripartite nested mealybug symbiosis


Citation
Husnik, McCutcheon (2016). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (37)
Names (1)
Subjects
Multidisciplinary
Abstract
Significance Mealybugs are plant sap-sucking insects with a nested symbiotic arrangement, where one bacterium lives inside another bacterium, which together live inside insect cells. These two bacteria, along with genes transferred from other bacteria to the insect genome, allow the insect to survive on its nutrient-poor diet. Here, we show that the innermost bacterium in this nested symbiosis was replaced several times over evolutionary history. These results show that highly integrated and interdependent symbiotic systems can experience symbiont replacement and suggest that similar dynamics could have occurred in building the mosaic metabolic pathways seen in mitochondria and plastids.
Authors
Publication date
2016-09-13
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1603910113

© 2022-2024 The SeqCode Initiative
  All information contributed to the SeqCode Registry is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license