The lost generation of Pemphigus populiglobuli (Hemiptera, Aphididae): exploring the taxonomy of the Svalbard aphids of genus Pemphigus.

Species identification within the aphid genus Pemphigus Hartig, 1839 poses challenges due to morphological similarities and host-plant associations. Aphids of this genus generally exhibit complex life cycles involving primary hosts (poplars) and secondary (mostly unrelated herbaceous) host-plants, with some species relying solely on root-feeding generation. An example is a representative of the genus Pemphigus, trophically associated with grass roots, found in the High Arctic Svalbard archipelago.

Probe electrospray ionization coupled to a quadrupole time-Of-flight: A feasibility study for the detection of cocaine and its derivatives in oral fluid.

Probe Electrospray Ionization (PESI) is an atmospheric pressure ionization method that can be directly coupled with a mass spectrometer to allow ultrafast analyses without chromatographic separation and with minimal sample preparation. Using the particular case of cocaine and its metabolites in human oral fluid, the main objective of the present study was to test the feasibility of a new hybrid system combining a PESI source and a quadrupole time-of-flight (QTOF). The best results were obtained for a sample preparation with a simple dilution of 100 µL of oral fluids in an ethanol / 10 mM ammonium formate buffer (50/50) and 10 µL deposited on a dedicated sample plate and introduced into the PESI source.

Evolutionary novelty in the apoptotic pathway of aphids.

Apoptosis, a conserved form of programmed cell death, shows interspecies differences that may reflect evolutionary diversification and adaptation, a notion that remains largely untested. Among insects, the most speciose animal group, the apoptotic pathway has only been fully characterized in , and apoptosis-related proteins have been studied in a few other dipteran and lepidopteran species. Here, we studied the apoptotic pathway in the aphid , an insect pest belonging to the Hemiptera, an earlier-diverging and distantly related order.

The Protector within: Comparative Genomics of APSE Phages across Aphids Reveals Rampant Recombination and Diverse Toxin Arsenals.

Phages can fundamentally alter the physiology and metabolism of their hosts. Although these phages are ubiquitous in the bacterial world, they have seldom been described among endosymbiotic bacteria. One notable exception is the APSE phage that is found associated with the gammaproteobacterial Hamiltonella defensa, hosted by several insect species.

The evolution of climate tolerance in conifer-feeding aphids in relation to their host's climatic niche.

Climate adaptation has major consequences in the evolution and ecology of all living organisms. Though phytophagous insects are an important component of Earth's biodiversity, there are few studies investigating the evolution of their climatic preferences. This lack of research is probably because their evolutionary ecology is thought to be primarily driven by their interactions with their host plants.

Serial horizontal transfer of vitamin-biosynthetic genes enables the establishment of new nutritional symbionts in aphids' di-symbiotic systems.

Many insects depend on obligate mutualistic bacteria to provide essential nutrients lacking from their diet. Most aphids, whose diet consists of phloem, rely on the bacterial endosymbiont Buchnera aphidicola to supply essential amino acids and B vitamins. However, in some aphid species, provision of these nutrients is partitioned between Buchnera and a younger bacterial partner, whose identity varies across aphid lineages.

PastView: a user-friendly interface to explore ancestral scenarios.

Background: Ancestral character states computed from the combination of phylogenetic trees with extrinsic traits are used to decipher evolutionary scenarios in various research fields such as phylogeography, epidemiology, and ecology. Despite the existence of powerful methods and software in ancestral character state inference, difficulties may arise when interpreting the outputs of such inferences. The growing complexity of data (trees, annotations), the diversity of optimization criteria for computing trees and ancestral character states, the combinatorial explosion of potential evolutionary scenarios if some ancestral characters states do not stand out clearly from others, requires the design of new methods to explore associations of phylogenetic trees with extrinsic traits, to ease the visualization and interpretation of evolutionary scenarios.

A genomic map of climate adaptation in Mediterranean cattle breeds.

Domestic species such as cattle (Bos taurus taurus and B. t. indicus) represent attractive biological models to characterize the genetic basis of short-term evolutionary response to climate pressure induced by their post-domestication history.

Multi-scale characterization of symbiont diversity in the pea aphid complex through metagenomic approaches.

Background: Most metazoans are involved in durable relationships with microbes which can take several forms, from mutualism to parasitism. The advances of NGS technologies and bioinformatics tools have opened opportunities to shed light on the diversity of microbial communities and to give some insights into the functions they perform in a broad array of hosts. The pea aphid is a model system for the study of insect-bacteria symbiosis.

A Freeloader? The Highly Eroded Yet Large Genome of the Serratia symbiotica Symbiont of Cinara strobi.

Genome reduction is pervasive among maternally inherited bacterial endosymbionts. This genome reduction can eventually lead to serious deterioration of essential metabolic pathways, thus rendering an obligate endosymbiont unable to provide essential nutrients to its host. This loss of essential pathways can lead to either symbiont complementation (sharing of the nutrient production with a novel co-obligate symbiont) or symbiont replacement (complete takeover of nutrient production by the novel symbiont).

A geography-aware reconciliation method to investigate diversification patterns in host/parasite interactions.

Cospeciation studies aim at investigating whether hosts and symbionts speciate simultaneously or whether the associations diversify through host shifts. This problem is often tackled through reconciliation analyses that map the symbiont phylogeny onto the host phylogeny by mixing different types of diversification events. These reconciliations can be difficult to interpret and are not always biologically realistic.

Buchnera has changed flatmate but the repeated replacement of co-obligate symbionts is not associated with the ecological expansions of their aphid hosts.

Symbiotic associations with bacteria have facilitated important evolutionary transitions in insects and resulted in long-term obligate interactions. Recent evidence suggests that these associations are not always evolutionarily stable and that symbiont replacement, and/or supplementation of an obligate symbiosis by an additional bacterium, has occurred during the history of many insect groups. Yet, the factors favouring one symbiont over another in this evolutionary dynamic are not well understood; progress has been hindered by our incomplete understanding of the distribution of symbionts across phylogenetic and ecological contexts.

SylvX: a viewer for phylogenetic tree reconciliations.

Motivation: Reconciliation methods aim at recovering the evolutionary processes that shaped the history of a given gene family including events such as duplications, transfers and losses by comparing the discrepancies between the topologies of the associated gene and species trees. These methods are also used in the framework of host/parasite studies to recover co-diversification scenarios including co-speciation events, host-switches and extinctions. These evolutionary processes can be graphically represented as nested trees.

Assessment of a 16S rRNA amplicon Illumina sequencing procedure for studying the microbiome of a symbiont-rich aphid genus.

The bacterial communities inhabiting arthropods are generally dominated by a few endosymbionts that play an important role in the ecology of their hosts. Rather than comparing bacterial species richness across samples, ecological studies on arthropod endosymbionts often seek to identify the main bacterial strains associated with each specimen studied. The filtering out of contaminants from the results and the accurate taxonomic assignment of sequences are therefore crucial in arthropod microbiome studies.

DNA barcoding and the associated PhylAphidB@se website for the identification of European aphids (Insecta: Hemiptera: Aphididae).

Unlabelled: Aphids constitute a diverse group of plant-feeding insects and are among the most important crop pests in temperate regions. Their morphological identification is time-consuming and requires specific knowledge, training and skills that may take years to acquire. We assessed the advantages and limits of DNA barcoding with the standard COI barcode fragment for the identification of European aphids.

Changes in diversification patterns and signatures of selection during the evolution of murinae-associated hantaviruses.

In the last 50 years, hantaviruses have significantly affected public health worldwide, but the exact extent of the distribution of hantavirus diseases, species and lineages and the risk of their emergence into new geographic areas are still poorly known. In particular, the determinants of molecular evolution of hantaviruses circulating in different geographical areas or different host species are poorly documented. Yet, this understanding is essential for the establishment of more accurate scenarios of hantavirus emergence under different climatic and environmental constraints.

Is ecological speciation a major trend in aphids? Insights from a molecular phylogeny of the conifer-feeding genus Cinara.

Introduction: In the past decade ecological speciation has been recognized as having an important role in the diversification of plant-feeding insects. Aphids are host-specialised phytophagous insects that mate on their host plants and, as such, they are prone to experience reproductive isolation linked with host plant association that could ultimately lead to species formation. The generality of such a scenario remains to be tested through macroevolutionary studies.

New data on aphid fauna (Hemiptera, Aphididae) in Algeria.

A survey of aphids was carried out during the period 2008-2011 in different regions of Algeria by collecting and identifying aphids and their host plants. Aphids were collected from 46 host plants. Forty-six species were reported including thirty-six species which were recorded for the first time in this country and thirty species which were recorded for the first time in the Maghreb (North Africa).

Contrasted evolutionary histories of two Toll-like receptors (Tlr4 and Tlr7) in wild rodents (MURINAE).

Background: In vertebrates, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that genes encoding proteins involved in pathogen-recognition by adaptive immunity (e.g. MHC) are subject to intensive diversifying selection.

Regular or covert sex defines two lineages and worldwide superclones within the leaf-curl plum aphid (Brachycaudus helichrysi, Kaltenbach).

Asexual reproduction occurs widely in plants and animals, particularly in insects. Aphid species usually reproduce by cyclic parthenogenesis, but many species include obligate asexual lineages. We recently showed that the leaf-curl plum aphid, Brachycaudus helichrysi, actually encompasses two lineages, B.

Evolution and diversity of Arsenophonus endosymbionts in aphids.

Endosymbiotic bacteria are important drivers of insect evolutionary ecology, acting both as partners that contribute to host adaptation and as subtle parasites that manipulate host reproduction. Among them, the genus Arsenophonus is emerging as one of the most widespread lineages. Its biology is, however, entirely unknown in most cases, and it is therefore unclear how infections spread through insect populations.

An extreme case of plant-insect codiversification: figs and fig-pollinating wasps.

It is thought that speciation in phytophagous insects is often due to colonization of novel host plants, because radiations of plant and insect lineages are typically asynchronous. Recent phylogenetic comparisons have supported this model of diversification for both insect herbivores and specialized pollinators. An exceptional case where contemporaneous plant-insect diversification might be expected is the obligate mutualism between fig trees (Ficus species, Moraceae) and their pollinating wasps (Agaonidae, Hymenoptera).

Inferring the origin of populations introduced from a genetically structured native range by approximate Bayesian computation: case study of the invasive ladybird Harmonia axyridis.

Correct identification of the source population of an invasive species is a prerequisite for testing hypotheses concerning the factors responsible for biological invasions. The native area of invasive species may be large, poorly known and/or genetically structured. Because the actual source population may not have been sampled, studies based on molecular markers may generate incorrect conclusions about the origin of introduced populations.

Permanent Genetic Resources added to Molecular Ecology Resources Database 1 December 2009-31 January 2010.

This article documents the addition of 220 microsatellite marker loci to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Allanblackia floribunda, Amblyraja radiata, Bactrocera cucurbitae, Brachycaudus helichrysi, Calopogonium mucunoides, Dissodactylus primitivus, Elodea canadensis, Ephydatia fluviatilis, Galapaganus howdenae howdenae, Hoplostethus atlanticus, Ischnura elegans, Larimichthys polyactis, Opheodrys vernalis, Pelteobagrus fulvidraco, Phragmidium violaceum, Pistacia vera, and Thunnus thynnus. These loci were cross-tested on the following species: Allanblackia gabonensis, Allanblackia stanerana, Neoceratitis cyanescens, Dacus ciliatus, Dacus demmerezi, Bactrocera zonata, Ceratitis capitata, Ceratitis rosa, Ceratits catoirii, Dacus punctatifrons, Ephydatia mülleri, Spongilla lacustris, Geodia cydonium, Axinella sp.

Slippery or sticky? Functional diversity in the trapping strategy of Nepenthes carnivorous plants.

The pitcher-shaped leaves of Nepenthes carnivorous plants have been considered as pitfall traps that essentially rely on slippery surfaces to capture insects. But a recent study of Nepenthes rafflesiana has shown that the viscoelasticity of the digestive fluid inside the pitchers plays a key role. Here, we investigated whether Nepenthes species exhibit diverse trapping strategies.