Life Sciences Commons^™

Partnering With A Pest: Genomes Of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid Symbionts Reveal Atypical Nutritional Provisioning Patterns In Dual-Obligate Bacteria, Kathryn M. Weglarz, Nathan P. Havill, Gaelen R. Burke, Carol D. Von Dohlen

Biology Faculty Publications

Nutritional bacterial symbionts enhance the diets of sap-feeding insects with amino acids and vitamins missing from their diets. In many lineages, an ancestral senior symbiont is joined by a younger junior symbiont. To date, an emergent pattern is that senior symbionts supply a majority of amino acids, and junior symbionts supply a minority. Similar to other hemipterans, adelgids harbor obligate symbionts, but have higher diversity of bacterial associates, suggesting a history of symbiont turnover. The metabolic roles of dual symbionts in adelgids and their contributions to the consortium are largely unexplored. Here, we investigate the symbionts of Adelges tsugae, …