Meeting Abstract
“How do organisms acquire new traits?” is a central question in evolutionary biology. We know that new traits can arise a number ways including mutations, gene duplications, and chromosomal inversions. We also know that prokaryotes, such as bacteria, can acquire traits from other bacteria or from their environment through a process known as horizontal gene transfer (HGT). These horizontally transferred genes can allow their new host to rapidly adapt to their environment. Until recently, it was thought the HGT happened only in prokaryotes, but multiple cases of functional HGT have been documented in a wide range of eukaryotes, including a variety of arthropod species. We currently have a very limited understanding of how widespread HGT is in eukaryotes and how it has contributed to the evolution and diversification of eukaryotes. The goal of this project is to identify, validate and characterize HGTs in fifteen species of blood-feeding and herbivorous arthropods. We are particularly interested in the role that HGTs play in allowing organisms to exploit new environments, therefore we will pay special attention to HGTs that are shared across multiple species that share a similar ecological niche, but are absent in more closely related arthropods that have a different feeding behavior. We hypothesize that HGT has repeatedly allowed for the independent acquisition of similar novel phenotypic traits in multiple distantly related arthropod species and has allowed for niche invasion and novel resource exploitation in these species. This work will test the prediction that HGTs will be shared by multiple niche-sharing species, either blood-feeders or herbivores, while being absent from more closely relates, but non-niche sharing species.
