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OPEN VERSUS CLOSED SYMBIOSIS. "All animals are colonized by microorganisms that promote the health and fitness of their animal host. Many associations are open, meaning that microorganisms can be gained by the animal from external sources and are shed from the animal back to the environment, but other associations are closed with obligate vertical transmission, generally from mother to offspring." https://lnkd.in/dzMQrDi View in LinkedIn

MATERNAL TRANSMISSION. "Diverse organisms are commonly associated with bacterial endosymbionts, which often affect hosts’ biology and phenotypes in a variety of ways. The majority of these symbionts are generally present in the host cell cytoplasm and maternally transmitted through host generations." https://lnkd.in/dzMQrDi View in LinkedIn

OBLIGATORY SYMBIOSIS. "Virtually all terrestrial arthropod species harbor vertically transmitted microbial endosymbionts that play critical roles in the biology of their hosts. Many well-studied examples involve obligate bacterial endosymbionts (i.e., they are absolutely required for survival and reproduction) that supply their host with essential nutrients that are missing from its diet." https://lnkd.in/dn7-uaE View in LinkedIn

VERTICAL SYMBIONTS. "The vertical transmission of symbiotic microorganisms is omnipresent in insects, while the evolutionary process remains totally unclear. In many cases, host insects and symbiotic microbes have phylogenetic congruence, strongly suggesting that these symbiotic associations have been maintained by strict vertical transmission." https://lnkd.in/dvW6NMZ View in LinkedIn

EXAMPLE OF NICHE EXPANSION. "Aphids and other sap-feeding insects rely on phloem sap or xylem sap as their only food, and these diets are extremely limited in essential amino acids and some vitamins. Use of these unbalanced diets is possible because symbionts supply missing nutrients." https://lnkd.in/dcBwzRs View in LinkedIn

NICHE EXPANSION VIA SYMBIONTS. "On macroevolutionary time scales, symbiont acquisition has often enabled evolutionary diversification and ecological expansion. By acquiring maternally transmitted bacterial symbionts, many insect lineages have succeeded in unlocking new ecological niches, particularly ones that present nutritionally unbalanced diets." https://lnkd.in/dcBwzRs View in LinkedIn

DARK MATTER. "The visible living world of organisms of all domains is literarily the tip of the iceberg surrounded by biology’s viral ‘‘dark matter’’ of which we are currently scratching the surface at best." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

VIRAL DIVERSITY. "A remarkable feature of viruses is the diversity of their genetic cycles, in a sharp contrast to the uniformity of the cellular genetic cycle. Viruses with different genome strategies span a vast range of genome sizes (the genomes of the largest known virus, the mimivirus, and the smallest viruses, e.g., circoviruses, differ by three orders of magnitude) and show a non-uniform and non-trivial distribution among the host taxa." https://lnkd.in/dHhQ6QH View in LinkedIn

VAST NUMBERS. "If we ignore eukaryotes and only consider prokaryotic life, we have a number of prokaryote viruses of 10(31), which means if we line up the length of their virions, we get 40 million light years." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn

DOMINANT LIFESTYLE. "We have heard much about non-coding RNAs, mobile genetic elements, repeat sequences, and introns— all of them formerly being termed ‘‘junk,’’ but now we can imagine these as remnants of persistent viral infection events. Thus, the persistent viral lifestyle is the most dominant biological lifestyle on this planet." https://lnkd.in/eWydwab View in LinkedIn