Acyrthosiphon pisum

 

The pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum is a member of Aphidinae , and the tribe Macrosphini which includes the important aphid agricultural pests Myzus persicae (the peach-potato pahid) and Diuraphis noxia (the Russian wheat aphid).
The pea aphid is distributed world-wide and feed mostly on Fabaceae like Medicago , Trifolium , Pisum or Vicia. Many races of the pea aphid can be found in the wild that differ in their host plant preferences, and some of these races represent incipient speciation events. It can transmit plant viral diseases by non-circulative viruses (e.g. in bean, peas, clover) and circulative viruses (e.g. Pea enation mosaic virus , Bean leaf-roll virus ).

Pea aphid life cycle

The pea aphid is the primary aphid used in laboratory studies due to its relatively large size and the simplicity of rearing. It can be reared through the entire life cycle on a single plant and methods for rearing this aphid on Petri dishes on excised leaves or on artificial diets have been developed. The pea aphid can be reared in the lab on many host plants, including the genomic model system Medicago truncatula.

 

The pea aphid has a haploid genome size of approximately 530 Mb on four holocentric chromosomes.
Information taken from the white paper
(link to http://www.princeton.edu/~dstern/Assets/PeaAphidGenome.pdf )