Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Issue: The Year in Evolutionary Biology REVIEW ARTICLE Dissecting genome reduction and trait loss in insect endosymbionts Amparo Latorre1,2 and Alejandro Manzano-Mar´ın1 1Institut Cavanilles de Biodiversitat I Biologia Evolutiva, Universitat de Valencia, C/Catedratico´ JoseBeltr´ an,´ Paterna, Valencia, Spain. 2Area´ de Genomica´ y Salud de la Fundacion´ para el fomento de la Investigacion´ Sanitaria y Biomedicadela´ Comunitat Valenciana (FISABIO)-Salud Publica,´ Valencia,` Spain Address for correspondence: Amparo Latorre, Institut Cavanilles de Biodiversitat i Biologia Evolutiva, Universitat de Valencia, C/Catedratico´ JoseBeltr´ an´ 2, 46071 Paterna, Valencia, Spain.
[email protected] Symbiosis has played a major role in eukaryotic evolution beyond the origin of the eukaryotic cell. Thus, organisms across the tree of life are associated with diverse microbial partners, conferring to the host new adaptive traits that enable it to explore new niches. This is the case for insects thriving on unbalanced diets, which harbor mutualistic intracellular microorganisms, mostly bacteria that supply them with the required nutrients. As a consequence of the lifestyle change, from free-living to host-associated mutualist, a bacterium undergoes many structural and metabolic changes, of which genome shrinkage is the most dramatic. The trend toward genome size reduction in endosymbiotic bacteria is associated with large-scale gene loss, reflecting the lack of an effective selection mechanism to maintain genes that are rendered superfluous by the constant and rich environment provided by the host. This genome- reduction syndrome is so strong that it has generated the smallest bacterial genomes found to date, whose gene contents are so limited that their status as cellular entities is questionable.