The genome of Arsenophonus sp. and its potential contribution in the corn planthopper, Peregrinus maidis

Authors: WANG, YU-HUI - North Carolina State University; MIKAELYAN, ARAM - North Carolina State University; Coates, Brad; LORENZEN, MARCE - North Carolina State University

Submitted to: Insects
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 1/30/2024
Publication Date: 2/5/2024
Citation: Wang, Y., Mikaelyan, A., Coates, B.S., Lorenzen, M.D. 2024. The genome of Arsenophonus sp. and its potential contribution in the corn planthopper, Peregrinus maidis. Insects. 15(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/insects15020113.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/insects15020113

Interpretive Summary: The corn planthopper is a pest of corn and sorghum in the eastern United States. This insect pest causes reduced crop vigor by direct feeding on plant sap and by spreading several plant pathogenic viruses, resulting in reduced crop yield and farmer profits. Farmers manage corn plant hopper damage by spraying chemical insecticides, but control remains difficult since this pest is sheltered under plant canopies. Chemical insecticides also have negative impacts on the environment and human health. Plant sap is a poor nutrition source that lacks essential dietary components, including vitamins, that are needed for insect survival. Insects that feed on sap, including the corn plant hopper, rely on bacteria within their cells to provide these essential dietary components. Methods to kill specific bacteria or inhibit their capacity to produce specific essential dietary components represents a potential strategy to control sap-feeding insects. Developing such targeted narrow-spectrum approaches requires knowledge of bacterial contributions to corn planthopper nutrition. An ARS researcher in Ames, IA along with university collaborators sequenced and assembled the genome of a bacteria that lives inside cells of the corn plant hopper. The function of genes encoded in the genome of this bacterium and the corn planthopper were predicted. This analysis identified genes predicted to produce essential dietary components, and showed that synthesis of B vitamins and essential amino acid production require the genes encoded by the bacterial. Specifically, the corn planthopper lacks the capacity to produce these essential dietary components on its own. This information will be of interest to public and private researchers concerned about damage to crop plants caused by arthropod pests, and may facilitate the development of novel strategies to control pest insects.

Technical Abstract: The corn planthopper, Peregrinus maidis, a pest of corn and sorghum. The co-evolution between bacterial endosymbionts and their insect hosts results in functional interdependencies including complementation in key biochemical pathways. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies has increased the ease and affordability of generating data for the assembly of insect symbiont genomes. In this study, genomic data recently generated from P. maidis was used assembled the 4.9 Mb genome of a symbiont, Pm Arsenophonus sp. This assembly is one of the largest Arsenophonus genomes reported to date. The Benchmarking Universal Single-Copy Orthologs (BUSCO) result indicated the Pm Arsenophonus sp. assembly has a high degree of completeness, with 96% of the single-copy Enterobacterales orthologs found. The identity of this Arsenophonus sp. was further confirmed by phylogenetic analysis. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis of the host and symbiont indicates contribution of Pm Arsenophonus sp. to the biosynthesis of B vitamins and essential amino acids to P. maidis, where threonine and lysine production is solely by Pm Arsenophonus sp.. This study provides insights into the evolutionary relationships between symbionts and their insect hosts, adds to our understanding of insect biology, and may inform the development of new pest control methods.