Sodalis glossinidius

Sodalis glossinidius is a species of bacteria, the type and only species of its genus. It is a microaerophilic secondary endosymbiont of the tsetse fly. Strain M1T is the type strain.^[1] Sodalis glossinidius is the only gammaproteobacterial insect symbiont to be cultured and thus amenable to genetic modification, suggesting that it could be used as part of a control strategy by vectoring antitrypanosome genes. The organism may increase the susceptibility of tsetse flies to trypanosomes.^[2]

Sodalis glossinidius
Scientific classification
Domain:	Bacteria
Phylum:	Pseudomonadota
Class:	Gammaproteobacteria
Order:	Enterobacterales
Family:	Pectobacteriaceae
Genus:	Sodalis
Species:	S. glossinidius Dale and Maudlin 1999

Genome

The genome of S. glossinidius spans 4.17 MB and encodes 2,431 protein-coding genes plus 1,501 pseudogenes. It is thus almost as large as that of E. coli (~4,100 genes). However, the number of genes encoding metabolic proteins is twice as large in E. coli, indicating that Sodalis has already a much reduced metabolic capacity.^[3]

Despite gene erosion and pseudogene multiplication in a genome of Sodalis glossinidius,^[4] its pseudogenes remain actively transcribed.^[5]

Parasites

S. glossinidius is itself host to a prophage discovered by Clark et al. 2007. ^[6]