Acyrthosiphon pisum, pea aphid

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cellular organisms - Eukaryota - Fungi/Metazoa group - Metazoa - Eumetazoa - Bilateria - Coelomata - Protostomia - Panarthropoda - Arthropoda - Mandibulata - Pancrustacea - Hexapoda - Insecta - Dicondylia - Pterygota - Neoptera - Paraneoptera - Hemiptera - Sternorrhyncha - Aphidiformes - Aphidomorpha - Aphidoidea - Aphididae - Aphidinae - Macrosiphini - Acyrthosiphon - Acyrthosiphon pisum

Brief facts

• Acyrthosiphon pisum belongs to large group (~4,000 species) of insects, Aphidinae (aphids), which specialized in feeding on the phloem sap of plants.
• Aphids may cause losses of up to 30% in crops. Moreover, they are efficient vectors of many viral diseases in plants.
• In comparison to many other aphid species that are entirely host specific, the pea aphid is found on a few different families of plants which are the alfalfas, clovers, and field beans.
• A. pisum is the primary aphid used in laboratory studies because of its relatively large size and simplicity of rearing.
• A. pisum has a haploid genome size of approximately 300Mb on four holocentric chromosomes.
• Aphids provide exellent model for maternally transmitted symbionts. The primary symbionts, Buchnera aphidicola, inhabits specialized cells (bacteriocytes), and is required for host development, growth and reproduction.

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Developmental stage (life cycle)

Life Cycle Stages

The life cycle of the pea aphid begins at spring and continues up to the moment when the insects start laying eggs for overwintering. In warm climates adult insects can continue feeding and parthenogenetic reproduction even in winter months.

• egg in fall oviparous (sexual) females lay fertilized eggs that hatch the follwing spring; the total period of egg development is approximately 100 days; this period is considered as an embryonic diapause, a physiological phenomenon of slow development under certain conditions; all insects that hatched from the eggs are females which reproduce by viviparous parthenogenesis
• nymph MeSH each asexual adult female gives birth up to 4-12 female nymphs per day; nymph develops into mature female for 7-10 days; when the colony becomes overcrowded some winged females are produced; the winged insects migrate to infest other plants
• adult there are following types of adults: asexual (viviparous parthenogenetic) females, which can be wingless or winged; sexual (oviparous) females, and males, which appear when temperatures become colder and light period shorter; life span of an adult is about 30 days

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Development the sexually-produced pea aphid embryo

Shingleton AW, Sisk GC, Stern DL. Diapause in the pea aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum) is a slowing but not a cessation of development. BMC Dev Biol. 2003; 3: 7. (PMID: 12908880)

Copyright © 2003 Shingleton et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.

Development the sexually-produced pea aphid embryo, under 'winter-like' conditions. (A) At day 15 the antennae (an), mandibles (not visible in this image), maxillae (mx), labium (lb), and thoracic limbs (t1–t3) are visible, as are the germ cells (gc) and bacteriocyte (b). (B) By day 21 the embryo has straightened with considerable growth of the appendages. (C) Nuclear staining of anti-Histone H3, which can be seen as brown spots (arrowhead) on the embryo, reveals cell division at day 21. (D) At day 35 the legs but not the body are longer than at day 21. (E) Cell division is also evident at day 35 with anti-Histone H3 staining (arrowhead). (F) At day 48 dividing cells stained with anti-Histone H3 are again observed (arrowhead). At this stage the embryo is lying in the centre of the egg. (G) At day 63 the embryo begins katatrepsis and has moved to the posterior of the egg, with the amnion (am) in contact with the serosa (s). (H) At day 70 the embryo is curled at the posterior of the egg. The amnion and serosa have fused into a single membrane, here called the amnioserosa. (I) At day 77 the embryo has completed katatrepsis and has a cap of putative aminioserosa at its anterior end. (J) At a slightly later stage another embryo has a reduced "amnioserosal cap". (K) At day 84 dorsal closure has been completed and the embryo has deposited an embryonic cuticle, complete with egg burster (eb). All scale bars are 100 μm long. Embryos are orientated as they would be in the egg, with the anterior of the egg to the left.

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Autumn Tree Colors as Warning Signals to Aphids?

Chittka L, Döring TF. Are autumn foliage colors red signals to aphids? PLoS Biol. 2007 Aug;5(8):e187. (PMID: 17696643)

At the beginning at this decade our view that the beauty of autumn leaves is only a by-product of physiological processes inside the doomed leaves were challenged. According to the new hypothesis, trees with particularly strong coloration send an honest signal to aphids, informing them of the strength of anti-herbivore defenses of these trees. But to appropriately predict the responses of aphids to colors requires us not only to examine the physiology of their eyes (inset lower right: scanning electron micrograph of the eye of the black bean aphid Aphis fabae, courtesy of J. Hardie) but also their behavioral responses to colors under controlled laboratory conditions (inset, upper left: the foxglove aphid Aulacorthum solani probing a yellow artificial target; photo by S. Kirchner).

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References

• Le Trionnaire G et al. Shifting from clonal to sexual reproduction in aphids: physiological and developmental aspects. Biol Cell. 2008 Aug;100(8):441-51.
• PubMed: free full text articles about aphids

Websites

• Proposal to sequence the genome of the Pea Aphid (Acyrthosiphon pisum).

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