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Appl. Environ. Microbiol. doi:10.1128/AEM.01877-06
Copyright (c) 2007, American Society for Microbiology and/or the Listed Authors/Institutions. All Rights Reserved.

Evolutionary relationships of Candidatus Riesia spp., endosymbiotic Enterobacteriaceae living within hematophagous primate lice

Zoology Department, University of Florida, 223 Bartram Hall, Gainesville FL 32611, USA; Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Dickinson Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA; School of Biological Sciences, University of Wales Bangor, Bangor LL57 2UW, United Kingdom

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: dreed{at}flmnh.ufl.edu.

	Abstract

The primary endosymbiotic bacteria from three species of parasitic primate lice were characterized molecularly. We have confirmed the characterization of the P-endosymbiont of the human head/body louse P. humanus, and provide new characterizations of the P-endosymbionts from Pediculus schaeffi from chimpanzees and Pthirus pubis the pubic louse of humans. The endosymbionts show an average percent sequence divergence of 11-15% from the most closely related known bacterium Candidatus Arsenophonus insecticola. We propose that two additional species be added to the genus Candidatus Riesia. The new species proposed within Candidatus Riesia have sequence divergences of 3.4% and 10-12% based on uncorrected pairwise differences. Our Bayesian analysis shows that the branching pattern for the primary endosymbionts was the same as that for their louse hosts, suggesting a long coevoluionary history between primate lice and their primary endosymbionts. We used a calibration of 5.6 million years to date the divergence between endosymbionts from human and chimpanzee lice and estimated an evolutionary rate of nucleotide substitution of 0.67% per million years, which is 15-30 times faster than previous estimates calculated for Buchnera, the primary endosymbiont in aphids. Given the evidence for cospeciation with primate lice, and the evidence for fast evolutionary rates, this lineage of endosymbiotic bacteria can be evaluated as a fast-evolving marker of both louse and primate evolutionary history.

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