Maternally inherited bacterial endosymbionts are common in many arthropod species. Some endosymbionts cause female-biased sex ratio distortion in their hosts that can result in profound changes to a host's mating behaviour and reproductive biology. Dance flies (Diptera: Empidinae) are well known for their unusual reproductive biology, including species with female-specific ornamentation and fem...

The requirement of vitamins for core metabolic processes creates a unique set of pressures for arthropods subsisting on nutrient-limited diets. While endosymbiotic bacteria carried by arthropods have been widely implicated in vitamin provisioning, the underlying molecular mechanisms are not well understood. To address this issue, standardized predictive assessment of vitamin metabolism was perf...

Symbiosis is prevalent in the marine environment with many studies examining the effects of such interactions between host and symbiont. Pontoniine shrimps are a group whose ecology is characterised by symbiotic interactions. This investigation examines the gross morphology of Pontoniinae compound eyes and superficial optical parameters with reference to their symbiotic relationship or lifestyl...

Many insects harbor inherited bacterial endosymbionts. Although some of them are not strictly essential and are considered facultative, they can be a key to host survival under specific environmental conditions, such as parasitoid attacks, climate changes, or insecticide pressures. The whitefly Bemisia tabaci is at the top of the list of organisms inflicting agricultural damage and outbreaks, a...

UNLABELLED Roughly 10% to 15% of insect species host heritable symbiotic bacteria known as endosymbionts. The lice parasitizing mammals rely on endosymbionts to provide essential vitamins absent in their blood meals. Here, we describe two bacterial associates from a louse, Proechinophthirus fluctus, which is an obligate ectoparasite of a marine mammal. One of these is a heritable endosymbiont t...

BACKGROUND Acanthamoeba- bacteria interactions enable pathogenic bacteria to tolerate harsh conditions and lead to transmission to the susceptible host. The present study was aimed to address the presence of bacterial endosymbionts of Acanthamoeba isolated from recreational water sources of Tehran, Iran. To the best of our knowledge this is the first study regarding occurrence of bacteria in en...

The streamlined genomes of ancient obligate endosymbionts generally lack transposable elements, such as insertion sequences (IS). Yet, the genome of Wolbachia, one of the most abundant bacterial endosymbionts on Earth, is littered with IS. Such a paradox raises the question as to why there are so many ISs in the genome of this ancient endosymbiont. To address this question, we investigated IS t...

Symbiotic associations are widespread in nature and represent a driving force in evolution. They are known to impact fitness, and thereby shape the host phenotype. Insects subsisting on nutritionally poor substrates have evolved mutualistic relationships with intracellular symbiotic bacteria (endosymbionts) that supply them with metabolic components lacking in their diet. In many species, endos...

It is known that PCR amplification of highly homologous genes from complex DNA mixtures can generate a significant proportion of chimeric sequences. The 16S rRNA gene is not only widely used in estimating the species diversity of endosymbionts in aphids but also used to explore the co-diversification of aphids and their endosymbionts. Thus, chimeric sequences may lead to the discovery of non-ex...

Microbial symbioses are interesting in their own right and also serve as exemplary models to help biologists to understand two important symbioses in the evolutionary past of eukaryotic cells: the origins of chloroplasts and mitochondria. Most, if not all, microbial symbioses have a chemical basis: compounds produced by one partner are useful for the other. But symbioses can also entail the tra...