Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
An endosymbiont or endobiont [1] is an organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism. Typically the two organisms are in a mutualistic relationship. Examples are nitrogen-fixing bacteria (called rhizobia ), which live in the root nodules of legumes , single-cell algae inside reef-building corals , and bacterial endosymbionts ...
Endophytes are micro-organisms living within the tissue of a plant as endosymbionts, without causing symptoms of disease.Some of them are mutualistic symbionts with beneficial effects on their host, such as improved growth or resistance against disease or environmental stress, and are being used as microbial inoculants.
For example, in the initial stages of endosymbiosis, due to a lack of major gene transfer, the host cell had little to no control over the endosymbiont. The endosymbiont underwent cell division independently of the host cell, resulting in many "copies" of the endosymbiont within the host cell.
There is evidence that plants and endophytes engage in communication with each other that can aid symbiosis. For example, plant chemical signals have been shown to activate gene expression in endophytes. One example of this plant-endosymbiont interaction occurs between dicotyledonous plants in the Convolvulaceae and clavicipitaceous fungi.
Fungal-bacterial endosymbiosis encompasses the mutualistic relationship between a fungus and intracellular bacteria species residing within the fungus. Many examples of endosymbiotic relationships between bacteria and plants, algae and insects exist and have been well characterized, however fungal-bacteria endosymbiosis has been less well described.
As the endosymbiont adapts to the host's lifestyle, the endosymbiont changes dramatically. There is a drastic reduction in its genome size, as many genes are lost during the process of metabolism , and DNA repair and recombination, while important genes participating in the DNA-to-RNA transcription , protein translation and DNA/RNA replication ...
The Tsetse fly's most prominent and vital endosymbiont is the bacterium, Wigglesworthia glossinidia, These bacteria are housed in the fly's bacteriocytes and produce B vitamins (B1, B6, and B9). The Tsetse fly itself lacks the ability to obtain these nutrients because of its hematophagous diet.
An example of such an endosymbiont is Candidatus Desulfovibrio trichonymphae, which was discovered to be an endosymbiont of Trichonympha agilis in 2009. [3] Desulfovibrio had previously been localized to the hindgut of lower termites, but it was not known that it is an endosymbiont of Trichonympha . [ 3 ]