Abstract
The mechanistic Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) pathway is deeply conserved across eukaryotes and plays a central role in relating nutritional and stress conditions to cell growth, cell survival, and autophagy. The mTOR pathway is also implicated as playing an important role in the model nutritional endosymbiosis between aphids and their intracellular symbionts Buchnera aphidicola through the expression of amino acid transporters which act upstream of mTOR signaling; the aphid/Buchnera relationship revolves around the synthesis and provisioning of amino acids. To investigate mTOR’s potential role in the aphid/Buchnera system and see how it might be responding to symbiotically important amino acids, I carried out an annotation and differential expression analysis of the mTOR pathway in aphids, before developing a tool and methodology to phenotype Buchnera populations within host cells. Using this tool I assessed how the aphid/Buchnera system responds to inhibition of the amino acid sensitive mTOR Complex 1, and uncovered a role for host mTOR signaling in regulating Buchnera population sizes, and aphid symbiotic cells. I suggest further study to fully characterize mTOR signaling’s role in endosymbiosis.