Genome sequencing of 46 strains of the obligate mutualistic endosymbiont of cockroaches, Blattabacterium

Reductive genome evolution is ubiquitous in symbiotic bacteria. However, how reduced genomes evolve is still unclear. One drawback to our current understanding of endosymbiont genome evolution is the low number of available genomes per system, which restricts the scale of hypothesis testing. To address this issue, we sequenced genomes of 46 strains of the obligate mutualistic endosymbiont of cockroaches, Blattabacterium, and performed a large-scale comparative genome analysis.