, Universitetsparken , DK Copenhagen, Denmark Present address Section for Organismal Biology, Division
, Universitetsparken , DK Copenhagen, Denmark Present address Section for Organismal Biology, Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Thorvaldsensvej , DK Frederiksberg, Denmark De Fine Licht and Boomsma; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.This can be an Open Access article distributed beneath the terms with the Creative Commons Attribution License (creativecommons.orglicensesby), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, supplied the original perform is effectively credited.The Inventive Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (creativecommons.orgpublicdomainzero) applies to the data made out there in this article, unless otherwise stated.De Fine Licht and Boomsma BMC Evolutionary Biology , www.biomedcentral.comPage ofBackground Considerable progress has been produced in understanding the origins, elaborations and occasional collapse of obligate symbiotic mutualisms .Probably the most vital aspects for understanding the evolutionary stability of such interactions is their degree of uni or bilateral specialization and integrative complementarity .Quite a few recent models have addressed questions of this sort, either emphasizing the dynamics of partner variation in onetoone interactions , or that hosts will settle for mixed communities of symbionts dominated by an unambiguous mutualist .Empirical studies have also yielded surprises, by way of example showing that numerous Central American figs have many pollinating wasps that happen to be morphologically indistinguishable , and that mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) cultivate numerous fungal species segregating in 4-IBP Autophagy distinct populations with variable recombination prices .In general, however, research of this kind are constrained by the have to have for neighborhood biodiversity to be higher enough to acquire enough statistical power, and by the regions exactly where such species richness is present getting quite a few cryptic species in order that interactionspecificity will be underestimated.This underlines that it truly is of crucial value that empirical research use genetic markers to establish the true specieslevel diversity of nearby guilds of hosts and symbionts just before embarking on analyses of interaction specificity.Here we document variation in interaction specificity and genetic diversity within a millionyearold obligate nutritional mutualism between ants and fungi and measure functional enzyme activity variation across sympatric host and symbiont species.The fungusgrowing attine ants comprise extant species, which all obligately cultivate fungus gardens for food although giving them with scavenged or actively harvested plant material as manure.Fungus gardens consist of a single basidiomycete fungal strain that may be cultivated in monoculture, but additionally includes bacteria and yeasts in variable prevalences .As a rule of PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21325134 thumb, the attine ants show a large degree of cophylogenetic congruence with their fungal cultivars at basal levels, but they often share cultivars in the antgenus level, which has been described as a kind of ‘diffuse’ coevolution .The phylogenetically derived higherattine genera Trachymyrmex, Sericomyrmex, Acromyrmex and Atta cultivate specialized Leucocoprinaceous fungi which have only been located in association with attine ants .Virgin queens ordinarily carry a fragment of mycelium from her maternal fungus garden as inoculum when founding new colonies , but this vertically transmission routine could be punctuated by occasional events of secondary horizontal exchange .T.