Meeting Abstract
Horizontal gene transfer also known as HGT, is the transfer of genetic material between different genomes by mechanisms other than common descent. Among bacteria and other prokaryotes, HGT is very common. Their genes can be transferred on plasmids, transposons, and integrons. However several recent studies have found genes that were horizontally transferred into the genomes of multicellular eukaryotes. Several cases of confirmed HGT of functional ecologically important genes have been confirmed in arthropods, including the coffee berry borer beetle, the two-spotted spider mite, aphids, and gall midges. Interestingly in several of these cases, the same phenotypically important gene has been independently transferred to two or more arthropod hosts. We were interested in examining how frequent, widespread, and important shared HGT is for the acquisition of ecologically important phenotypic traits in arthropods. In order to do do this, arthropods that share an ecological niche (blood-feeding) were analyzed to find functional shared candidate HT genes. Specifically, we used publically available ESTs from the kissing bug Rhodnius prolixus to look for genes shared with other blood-feeding insects (including Aedes aegypti, Culex quinquefasciatus, Anopheles gambiae, Ixodes scapularis, and Rhipicephalus appendiculatus), but missing from closely related non-blood feeding insects (including Acyrthosiphon pisum, Bemisia tabaci,Tetranychus urticae, Diaphorina citri, Mayetiola destructor, and Drosophila melanogaster ). For selected candidate genes, we built phylogenetic trees to find anomalies and identify phylogenetic discordance. These candidate shared blood-feeding HT genes will be further analyzed and confirmed using techniques such as tissue-specific qPCR, PCR across animal-bacterial junctions, and fluorescent in situ hybridization.
