by Roberto
One of the great perks of writing for this blog at this stage in my career is that I have nearly zero constraints when it comes to the scientific literature I read. My formula is simple: whenever I find something interesting, I read about it. Otherwise, not likely. Fortunately, there are so many fascinating topics there is no shortage of reading material and, this is another perk, there's (almost) never any hurry. In preparing our recent post on ectosymbionts, I discovered Jan Sapp's 2002 perspective: "Paul Buchner (1886 –1978) and hereditary symbiosis in insects." I suspect that many STC readers will immediately recognize the name of Paul Buchner, after whom Paul Baumann named the now well-known aphid endosymbiont Buchnera. But I also suspect most will not know too much about Buchner's seminal contributions to the field of insect endosymbionts, so I highly recommend this hidden gem. I most certainly learned a lot from reading it; in a little over five printed pages Sapp beautifully summarizes not only Buchner's life but also the historical context that saw the birth and development of the field.
Fig. 1. Schizaphis gramium, an aphid species that harbors the endosymbiont Buchnera aphidicola. Source
Here's a personal vignette that I hope will stimulate those of you teaching or learning the subject of insect-microbe symbioses to read this historical piece. Sometime in the early 1980s – I think it was when I was a post-doc, but the exact year is lost to me now – I had the good fortune to walk into Paul Baumann's office at University of California, Davis. The date is important because it was in 1986 that Paul phoned Nancy Moran in need of her expertise in entomology; their ensuing collaboration broke the field of insect endosymbionts wide open. So, my visit was early in the modern history of this field. I remember being immediately fascinated with the story of aphids subsisting on tryptophan-deficient plant sap thanks to endosymbionts. These intracellular bacteria were essentially tryptophan factories, in part because they had a plasmid with several copies of the genes encoding anthranilate synthase, the first enzyme in the committed pathway of tryptophan biosynthesis. Why my fascination? As a graduate student I had worked on plasmids and as a post-doc I was working on the regulation of the tryptophan operon. To me: plasmids + tryptophan = fascinating. How narrow my thinking! Consequently, when I started teaching about insect endosymbionts some years later, I was very narrow and covered only the molecular genetics. How I wish I had taken the time back then to study the history of how endosymbionts were discovered. That knowledge would have greatly enriched my lectures. My message to teachers and students alike: dig deep into the history of your subject matter, it will greatly broaden your horizons!
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