This dataset contains data from two-part experiments described in the paper: “El Hamss, H., Ghosh, S., M. N., M., Delatte, H., & Colvin, J. (2021). Microbiome diversity and reproductive incompatibility induced by the prevalent endosymbiont Arsenophonus in two species of African cassava Bemisia tabaci whiteflies. Ecology and Evolution, 00, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.840”.

The experiment investigates the effects of Arsenophonus on whitefly reproduction and microbiome diversity.

In the first experiment (“crossing experiment”), the effect of Arsenophonus is studied on number of eggs, nymphs, males, and females on different whitefly species at intraspecies level (SSA1-SG3A+ with SSA1-SG3A-) and at interspecies level (SSA2A+ with SSA1-SG3A- and SSA1-SG3A+). Arsenophonus infection A+ means the presence of Arsenophonus in related whitefly colony, A- means the absence of Arsenophonus.

In the second experiment (“microbiome diversity”), whitefly colonies of crossed parents and generated progenies were sequenced to check Arsenophonus threshold (number of reads) and the presence of other bacteria in those crossed whiteflies.

The main results of this work are:

(i) Arsenophonus did not induce reproductive incompatibility within SSA1-SG3 but reduced the number of eggs, nymphs and female ratios,

(ii) complete RI was observed between SSA1-SG3 and SSA2 indicating the lack of gene flow between the two whitefly species,

(iii) many new ‘other bacteria’ in SSA B. tabaci have been identified, whose role remains to be investigated.

The DNA of the microbiome dataset was extracted from single whitefly after the crossing experiment in insectary in NRI, University of Greenwich, UK. The DNA has been then sequenced by Illumina Hiseq, then the final filtered reads were clustered and assigned. The statistical analyses were subsequently carried out using the attached excel sheet of a series of bacteria. One-way ANOVA test was carried out to investigate bacterial diversity parameters such as Simpson index and observed OTUs. Bray–Curtis dissimilarities between all pairwise combinations of whitefly samples were ordinated following a non-metric multidimensional scaling (nMDS). The methods are well described and accepted for publication in Ecology and Evolution journal.

The readme file contains an explanation of each of the variables in the dataset, the way it was collected from the primary data. Information on how the crossing experiments and microbiome analyses were done can be found in the associated manuscript referenced above.