Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 20, 2025

Author Spotlight: Axenic Rearing of Delia antiqua to Detect the Impact of Intestinal Microbes on Its Growth and Development
Published on: December 22, 2023
Experimental uncoupling of hosts and endosymbionts
Honglin Feng1, Alex C C Wilson2
1Department of Entomology, Louisiana State University AgCenter, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.
Abstract:
Many organisms harbor heritable bacterial symbionts that offer context-specific benefits to their hosts. In some of these symbioses, symbionts live inside host cells as endosymbionts. Studying the biology of endosymbiosis is challenging because it is hard to independently cultivate hosts and endosymbionts. A recent study, using a simple defined growth medium at ambient temperature, established an axenic culture of the pea aphid's heritable bacterial endosymbiont, Candidatus Fukatsuia symbiotica (G. P. Maeda, M. K. Kelly, A. Sundar, and N. A. Moran, mBio 15:e03253-23, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.03253-23). Notably, the monoculture was capable of host recolonization, was stably transmitted, and returned similar host phenotypes to those observed in native infections. This advance in uncoupling the cultivation of an endosymbiont and its host opens avenues for genetic manipulation of the endosymbiont that will facilitate hypothesis-driven work to explore the mechanisms of host-endosymbiont biology and potentially facilitate the development of symbiont-mediated practical-application biotechnologies.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Symbiosis
Eukaryotic Evolution
Contrary to the endosymbiont theory, the eukaryote-first hypothesis proposes that the simpler prokaryotic and...
Coupled Reactions
Energy in adenosine triphosphate or ATP molecules is easily accessible to do work. ATP powers the majority of energy-requiring cellular reactions....
Eukaryotic Compartmentalization
For example, lysosomes in the animal...
Retrovirus Life Cycles

