Publication Date:
2003-01-18
Description:
The symbiosis between fungus-growing ants and the fungi they cultivate for food has been shaped by 50 million years of coevolution. Phylogenetic analyses indicate that this long coevolutionary history includes a third symbiont lineage: specialized microfungal parasites of the ants' fungus gardens. At ancient levels, the phylogenies of the three symbionts are perfectly congruent, revealing that the ant-microbe symbiosis is the product of tripartite coevolution between the farming ants, their cultivars, and the garden parasites. At recent phylogenetic levels, coevolution has been punctuated by occasional host-switching by the parasite, thus intensifying continuous coadaptation between symbionts in a tripartite arms race.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Currie, Cameron R -- Wong, Bess -- Stuart, Alison E -- Schultz, Ted R -- Rehner, Stephen A -- Mueller, Ulrich G -- Sung, Gi-Ho -- Spatafora, Joseph W -- Straus, Neil A -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2003 Jan 17;299(5605):386-8.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. ccurrie@ku.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12532015" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Agaricales/growth & development/*physiology
;
Animals
;
Ants/microbiology/*physiology
;
Ascomycota/physiology
;
Bacterial Physiological Phenomena
;
*Biological Evolution
;
DNA, Fungal/analysis/genetics
;
Hypocreales/classification/growth & development/isolation &
;
purification/*physiology
;
Phylogeny
;
Sequence Analysis, DNA
;
*Symbiosis
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
