Parasitic Wood Wasp Genome Project


Parasitic Wood Wasp (Orussus abietinus)

Parasitic wood wasp

Parasitic Wood Wasp

Photo by Oliver Niehius
Source: The Bonn group, Oliver Niehuis

Contact: Oliver Niehuis

Researchers involved:
Size (or size of nearest relative):

Keywords (and why important):

Representative of the wasp (Hymenoptera) family Orussidae: the parasitic wood wasp Orussus abietinus parasitizes wood-boring beetle larvae and exhibits numerous remarkable characteristics, such as an ovipositor that internally loops through the abdomen and thorax and eggs longer than the body size of the adult female.

What makes parasitic wood wasps even more interesting, however, is the fact that they are the only lineage of parasitic wasps that primarily do not possess a wasp waist. In fact, orussids are thought to be the sister lineage of the tremendously successful and species rich Apocrita. The latter include all primarily parasitic wasps with wasp waist and all ants and bees.

Orussids are critical for understanding the evolution of a parasitoid life history and the associated adaptations at the genomic level.

Genomic Resources


For the most current version of the assembly, please use 'NCBI BioProject' (find link below). If the assembly is unavailable in the BioProject page (it is still being worked on), you can look under the 'BCM-HGSC data' (find link below) for intermediate versions of the assembly.


Web Apollo: A web-based sequence annotation editor for community annotation

For information about Web Apollo, please contact Monica Poelchau.