Alternative Transmission Patterns in Independently Acquired Nutritional Cosymbionts of Dictyopharidae Planthoppers
Anna Michalik, Diego C. Franco, Michał Kobiałka, Teresa Szklarzewicz, Adam Stroiński, Piotr Łukasik
Abstract
Sup-sucking hemipterans host ancient heritable microorganisms that supplement their unbalanced diet with essential nutrients and have repeatedly been complemented or replaced by other microorganisms. These symbionts need to be reliably transmitted to subsequent generations through the reproductive system, and often they end up using the same route as the most ancient ones. We show for the first time that in a single family of planthoppers, the complementing symbionts that have established infections independently utilize different transmission strategies, one of them novel, with the transmission of different microbes separated spatially and temporally. These data show how newly arriving microbes may utilize different strategies to establish long-term heritable symbioses.