Tsubasa Ohbayashi

National Agriculture and Food Research Organization | NARO · Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences

Significance In general, animals have a mouth for feeding, an anus for defecation, and a gut connecting them for digestion and absorption. However, we discovered that the stinkbug’s gut is functionally disconnected in the middle by a previously unrecognized organ for symbiont sorting, which blocks food fluid and nonsymbiotic bacteria but selectivel...

In the symbiosis of the bean bug Riptortus pedestris with Burkholderia insecticola, the bacteria occupy an exclusive niche in the insect midgut and favor insect development and reproduction. In order to understand how the symbiotic bacteria stably colonize the midgut crypts and which services they provide to the host, we compared the cytology, phys...

How host organisms evolved and maintain specific mutualisms with microorganisms is a fundamental question that is subject to intensive research. In the large majority of insect mutualisms, the host-microbe specificity is maintained by a “partner fidelity” mechanism, mainly through direct symbiont transmission from mother to offspring. Such vertical...

Insects of the heteropteran superfamilies Coreoidea and Lygaeoidea are consistently associated with symbionts of a specific group of the genus Burkholderia, called the "stinkbug-associated beneficial and environmental (SBE)" group. The symbiosis is maintained by the environmental transmission of symbionts. We investigated European and Japanese popu...

Many stinkbugs in the superfamily Coreoidea (Hemiptera: Heteroptera) develop crypts in the posterior midgut, harboring Caballeronia (Burkholderia) symbionts. These symbionts form a monophyletic group in Burkholderia sensu lato, called the "stinkbug-associated beneficial and environmental (SBE)" group, recently reclassified as the new genus Caballer...

Caballeronia insecticola is a bacterium belonging to the Burkholderia genus sensu lato , able to colonize multiple environments like soils and the gut of the bean bug Riptortus pedestris . To identify the essential genome of a bacterium is a first step in the understanding of its lifestyles. We constructed a saturated Himar1 mariner transposon libr...

Significance The insect respiratory system consists of tubular tracheae that transport oxygen to the organs. We show that, in the insect pest Riptortus pedestris , the establishment of an essential symbiosis in the gut with the aerobic bacterial species Burkholderia insecticola triggers the development of an extensive tracheal network enveloping th...

The potent and selective Gq protein inhibitor depsipeptide FR900359 (FR), originally discovered as the product of an uncultivable plant endosymbiont, is synthesized by a complex biosynthetic system comprising two nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) assembly lines. Here we characterize a cultivable bacterial FR producer, enabling detailed investi...

Bacterial cell shapes may be altered by the cell cycle, nutrient availability, environmental stress, and interactions with other organisms. The bean bug Riptortus pedestris possesses a symbiotic bacterium, Burkholderia insecticola, in its midgut crypts. This symbiont is a typical rod-shaped bacterium under in vitro culture conditions, but changes t...

In addition to abiotic triggers, biotic factors such as microbial symbionts can alter development of multicellular organisms. Symbiont-mediated morphogenesis is well-investigated in plants and marine invertebrates but rarely in insects despite the enormous diversity of insect-microbe symbioses. The bean bug Riptortus pedestris is associated with Bu...

Significance How are specific host-symbiont mutualisms stabilized without vertical transmission? This is one of the fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. To ensure specificity, animals and plants have evolved sophisticated sorting mechanisms. Theoretical studies proposed another mechanism, so-called “competition-based selection,” where hos...

A Gram-negative, aerobic, rod-shaped, non-spore-forming, motile bacterium, designated strain RPE64T, was isolated from the gut symbiotic organ of the bean bug Riptortus pedestris, collected in Tsukuba, Japan, in 2007. 16S rRNA gene sequencing showed that this strain belongs to the Burkholderia glathei clade, exhibiting the highest sequence similari...

The cyclic depsipeptide FR900359 (FR), isolated from the tropical plant Ardisia crenata, displays a strong and selective inhibition of Gq proteins, making it an indispensable pharmacological tool to study Gq-related processes, as well as a promising drug candidate. Gq inhibition is a novel mode of action for defense chemicals and crucial for the ec...

Recent studies have suggested that gut symbionts modulate insect development and reproduction. However, the mechanisms by which gut symbionts modulate host physiologies and the molecules involved in these changes are unclear. To address these questions, we prepared three different groups of the insect Riptortus pedestris: Burkholderia gut symbiont-...