Project description:Virus infections of insects can easily stay undetected, neither showing typical signs of a disease, nor being lethal. Such a stable and most of the time covert infection with Phthorimaea operculella granulovirus (PhopGV) was detected in a Phthorimaea operculella laboratory colony, which originated from Italy (Phop-IT). This covert virus (named PhopGV-R) was isolated, purified and characterized at the genetic level by full genome sequencing. Furthermore, the insect colony Phop-IT was used to study the crowding effect, double infection with other PhopGV isolates (CR3 and GR1), and co-infection exclusion. An infection with a second homologous virus (PhopGV-CR3) activated the covert virus, while a co-infection with another virus isolate (PhopGV-GR1) led to its suppression. This study shows that stable virus infections can be common for insect populations and have an impact on population dynamics because they can suppress or enable co-infection with another virus isolate of the same species.
Project description:In this research, the complete mitochondrial genome (mitogenome) of Phthorimaea operculella was sequenced and annotated. The mitogenome of P. operculella is 15,269 bp in length and contains 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, 2 ribosome RNA (12s and 16srRNA) genes and 1 control region. In addition, we used Endoclita signifier as the outgroup to analyze phylogenetic relationship, and the phylogenetic tree showed the sister relationship between P. operculella and Tuta absoluta.
