Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

Evolution of endosymbiont genomes

Participants : Guillaume Beslon, Stephan Fischer, Carole Knibbe, David P. Parsons, Bérénice Batut.

Endosymbiotic organisms alway own shorter genomes than free living ones. This particularly the case in the prokaryotic kingdom. Many hypothesis have been proposed in the literature to explain this observation but it is very difficult to disentangle the effect of the proposed mechanisms and to asses whether they lead – or not – to genome reduction. We have received a BQR grant from INSA-Lyon to investigate this question by a joint work with aevol (to test in silico the different hypothesis) and with comparative genomic approaches (to better characterize the structural difference between short and long genomes). Total amount funded : 15,000 euros.