The use of physiological data to corroborate cospeciation events in symbiosis.

Abstract

The symbiotic association between sepiolid squids (Family Sepiolidae) and luminous bacteria (Genus Vibrio) provides an unusually tractable model to study the evolution and speciation of mutualistic partnerships. Both host and symbiont can be cultured separately, providing a new avenue to test phylogenetic congruence through molecular and physiological techniques. Combining both molecular and morphological data as well as measuring the degree of infectivity between closely related pairs can help decipher not only patterns of co-speciation between these tightly linked associations, but can also shed new light on the evolution of specificity and recognition among animal-bacterial associations.