A new paper - the result of Piotr's collaboration with John McCutcheon's laboratory at Arizona State University - has just been published in Genome Biology and Evolution! In the paper, we explore the transcriptional patterns in ancient nutritional symbionts of cicadas, and how they might be changing as the symbioses evolve.

We have found that the transcription of the symbiont Sulcia is relatively conserved across divergent cicada species. On the other hand, the second symbiont, Hodgkinia shows little evidence of basic transcriptional control. In cicada species where Hodgkinia had evolved into complexes of genetically and cytologically lineages, transcription of different genes is highly. variable. Our data add to evidence for the costly nature of degenerating ancient nutritional symbioses.

The paper is available open-access from GBE:

Spencer N., Łukasik P., Meyer M., Veloso C., McCutcheon J.P. (2023): No transcriptional compensation for extreme gene dosage imbalance in fragmented bacterial endosymbionts of cicadas. Genome Biology and Evolution 15(6): evad100, https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad100

 

Added: 4th June 2023