38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Invertebrate Pathology

The polydnaviruses are an unusual group of viruses that exist in obligatory symbiosis with the genomes of parasitic wasps. The genomes of a number of polydnaviruses have recently been sequenced and are found to be largely non-coding, encode gene families and have few genes that are related to genes from other viruses. The polydnavirus genes that can be identified by comparison to database sequences are related to genes from eukaryotic cells. In this presentation, I will summarize the data from the available sequenced genome and compare and contrast the polydnavirus genomes from the different phylogenetic clades. This comparison will identify shared and unique features between and within polydnavirus lineages in hopes of revealing evolutionary processes that have acted on these genomes and thereby develop testable hypotheses that may orient and drive future research in this field.