Acyrthosiphon pisum, pea aphid

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.