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

Filip Husnik, John P. McCutcheon
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/042267
Filip Husnik
1University of Montana, Division of Biological Sciences, Missoula, USA
2Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre CAS & University of South Bohemia, Faculty of Science, Ceske Budejovice, Czech Republic
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John P. McCutcheon
1University of Montana, Division of Biological Sciences, Missoula, USA
3Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, CIFAR Program in Integrated Microbial Biodiversity, Toronto, Canada
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Abstract

Stable endosymbiosis of a bacterium into a host cell promotes cellular and genomic complexity. The mealybug Planococcus citri has two bacterial endosymbionts; remarkably, the gammaproteobacterium Moranella endobia lives in the cytoplasm of the betaproteobacterium Tremblaya princeps. These two bacteria, along with genes horizontally transferred from other bacteria to the P. citri genome, encode complementary gene sets that form a complex metabolic patchwork. Here we test the stability of this three-way symbiosis by sequencing host-symbiont genome pairs for five diverse mealybug species. We find marked fluidity over evolutionary time: while Tremblaya is the result of a single infection in the ancestor of mealybugs, the innermost gammaproteobacterial symbionts result from multiple replacements of inferred different ages from related but distinct bacterial lineages. Our data show that symbiont replacement can happen even in the most intricate symbiotic arrangements, and that pre-existing horizontally transferred genes can remain stable on genomes in the face of extensive symbiont turnover.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted March 03, 2016.
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Repeated replacement of an intrabacterial symbiont in the tripartite nested mealybug symbiosis
Filip Husnik, John P. McCutcheon
bioRxiv 042267; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/042267
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Repeated replacement of an intrabacterial symbiont in the tripartite nested mealybug symbiosis
Filip Husnik, John P. McCutcheon
bioRxiv 042267; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/042267

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