Revisiting the first case of insect-bacteria cospeciation: phylogenetic incongruence between aphids and their obligate endosymbiont at subfamily level
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Entomology, Evolutionary Studies, Genetics, Microbiology, Zoology
- Keywords
- horizontal transmission, codiversification, endosymbiont, evolutionary rate, phylogenetic relationship
- Copyright
- © 2014 Liu et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Revisiting the first case of insect-bacteria cospeciation: phylogenetic incongruence between aphids and their obligate endosymbiont at subfamily level. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e346v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.346v1
Abstract
It has been widely accepted that aphids and their primary endosymbiotic bacteria Buchnera have strictly parallel diversification relationship. As the first reported case of insect-bacteria cospeciation, this parallel diversification hypothesis has been prevalent, in spite of its basis of limited taxonomic sampling and recent doubts. Here we revisit the evolutionary relationships between aphids and Buchnera by using much more taxa and genomic data (16S rDNA, ATP synthase β-subunit gene, and gluconate-6-phosphate dehydrogenase gene) to reconstruct the Buchnera phylogeny and test its congruence with the host phylogeny. Comparisons of the Buchnera phylogeny with morphology- and molecular-based aphid phylogenies indicate phylogenetic incongruence between aphids and Buchnera at subfamily level. Current empirical and theoretical evidence indicate two potential mechanisms underlying this incongruence: one is variation in evolutionary rates of Buchnera genomes among different aphid lineages; the other is horizontal transmission of Buchnera during the radiation of extant aphid subfamilies and tribes from their common ancestor.