0000000001289368

AUTHOR

Marie-france Sagot

Genome reduction and potential metabolic complementation of the dual endosymbionts in the whitefly Bemisia tabaci

Background The whitefly Bemisia tabaci is an important agricultural pest with global distribution. This phloem-sap feeder harbors a primary symbiont, “Candidatus Portiera aleyrodidarum”, which compensates for the deficient nutritional composition of its food sources, and a variety of secondary symbionts. Interestingly, all of these secondary symbionts are found in co-localization with the primary symbiont within the same bacteriocytes, which should favor the evolution of strong interactions between symbionts. Results In this paper, we analyzed the genome sequences of the primary symbiont Portiera and of the secondary symbiont Hamiltonella in the B. tabaci Mediterranean (MED) species in orde…

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The transposable element-rich genome of the cereal pest Sitophilus oryzae

AbstractBackgroundThe rice weevil Sitophilus oryzae is one of the most important agricultural pests, causing extensive damage to cereal in fields and to stored grains. S. oryzae has an intracellular symbiotic relationship (endosymbiosis) with the Gram-negative bacterium Sodalis pierantonius and is a valuable model to decipher host-symbiont molecular interactions.ResultsWe sequenced the Sitophilus oryzae genome using a combination of short and long reads to produce the best assembly for a Curculionidae species to date. We show that S. oryzae has undergone successive bursts of transposable element (TE) amplification, representing 72% of the genome. In addition, we show that many TE families a…

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Longest Motifs with a Functionally Equivalent Central Block

International audience; This paper presents a generalization of the notion of longest repeats with a block of k don't care symbols introduced by [Crochemore et al., LATIN 2004] (for k fixed) to longest motifs composed of three parts: a first and last that parameterize match (that is, match via some symbol renaming, initially unknown), and a functionally equivalent central block. Such three-part motifs are called longest block motifs. Different types of functional equivalence, and thus of matching criteria for the central block are considered, which include as a subcase the one treated in [Crochemore et al., LATIN 2004] and extend to the case of regular expressions with no Kleene closure or …

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Two Host Clades, Two Bacterial Arsenals: Evolution through Gene Losses in Facultative Endosymbionts.

International audience; Bacterial endosymbiosis is an important evolutionary process in insects, which can harbor both obligate and facultative symbionts. The evolution of these symbionts is driven by evolutionary convergence, and they exhibit among the tiniest genomes in prokaryotes. The large host spectrum of facultative symbionts and the high diversity of strategies they use to infect new hosts probably impact the evolution of their genome and explain why they undergo less severe genomic erosion than obligate symbionts. Candidatus Hamiltonella defensa is suitable for the investigation of the genomic evolution of facultative symbionts because the bacteria are engaged in specific relations…

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