White Paper

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Over the past years, several significant advances have been made towards developing aphids as a model system for evolutionary genetics and genomics. The International Aphid Genomic Consortium (link to http://www.princeton.edu/~dstern/AphidResLinks.htm) was created in Paris (June 2003) in order to coordinate various efforts, both to cut down on unnecessary redundancy and to enhance the likelihood of future for large-scale projects. The ultimate goal of this network is to develop the aphid model system to the same level of molecular, cell, and developmental biological understanding as other model insects (mosquito, drosophila, Lepidoptera, bee…), but with the added advantage of being able to more easily study the mechanisms of adaptation and biotic interactions in the context of natural and agronomic environments. It was decided to focus on one aphid species: the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum, the primary species used in laboratory and genetic studies.

 

         

	Acyrthosiphon pisum
Diuraphis noxia		Sitobion avenae
	Myzus persicae

 

The main efforts performed since 2003 concerned the production of Expressed Sequence Tags not only from the pea aphid but also from Toxoptera citricida , Myzus persicae and Aphis goosypii . A steering committee wrote in 2004 a white paper to propose the sequencing of the genome of the pea aphid ( Acyrthosiphon pisum ).
The National Human Genome Research Institute pointed this project in March 2005 as a priority and the first sequences of the 530 Mb genome of A. pisum are already available  (see Traces Archives at the NCBI).
Sequences are produced by the Baylor College of Medicine ( Houston, USA ).