The pine aphid Cinara pinitabulaeformis Zhang et Zhang is the main pine pest in China, it causes pine needles to produce dense dew (honeydew) which can lead to sooty mold (black filamentous saprophytic ascomycetes). Although common chemical and physical strategies are used to prevent the disease caused by C. pinitabulaeformis Zhang et Zhang, new strategies based on biological and/or genetic app...

We describe a new species of pine bark beetle, Phloeosinus laricionis, associated with a pine decline recently affecting young plantations of Pinus nigra ssp. laricio Poiret growing on the Etna volcano, Sicily (South Italy). The new species is morphologically close to the group species of P. cedri Brisout, P. acatayi Schedl, and P. pfefferi Knížek, having all odd interstriae on the declivity of...

Keiichi Itoi,1,2 Naoya Sugimoto,1 Saya Suzuki,1,2 Keisuke Sawada,1 Gopal Das,1 Katsuya Uchida,1 Toshimitsu Fuse,1 Shinji Ohara,3 and Kazuto Kobayashi4 1Laboratory of Information Biology, Graduate School of Information Sciences, and 2Division of Neuroendocrinology, Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University, Sendai 980-8579, Japan, 3Department of Neurology, Matsumoto Medical Center, Matsumot...

Buchnera aphidicola is an obligate symbiotic bacterium that sustains the physiology of aphids by complementing their exclusive phloem sap diet. In this study, we reappraised the transport function of different Buchnera strains, from the aphids Acyrthosiphon pisum, Schizaphis graminum, Baizongia pistaciae and Cinara cedri, using the re-annotation of their transmembrane proteins coupled with an e...

Particularly interesting cases of mutualistic endosymbioses come from the establishment of co-obligate associations of more than one species of endosymbiotic bacteria. Throughout symbiotic accommodation from a free-living bacterium, passing through a facultative stage and ending as an obligate intracellular one, the symbiont experiences massive genomic losses and phenotypic adjustments. Here, w...

Bacterial communities may display metabolic complementation, in which different members of the association partially contribute to the same biosynthetic pathway. In this way, the end product of the pathway is synthesized by the community as a whole. However, the emergence and the benefits of such complementation are poorly understood. Herein, we present a simple model to analyze the metabolic i...

A study was conducted on the aphid fauna of Pinus nigra Arnold. subsp. pallasiana (Lamb.) Holmboe., brutia Ten., Cedrus libani A. Rich., Abies cilicica (Antoine & Kotschy) Carrière (Pinaceae), Juniperus spp. (Cupressaceae), Quercus (Fagaceae) and Robinia pseudoacacia L. (Leguminosae) forests in Isparta Province between 2018 2020. Using systematic random sampling, 9,252 specimens 68 spec...