Read on Twitter
New paper on the stability of Wolbachia in mosquitoes is out today on bioRxiv. Thread. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/853473v1
Remember the wMelPop or ‘popcorn’ strain of Wolbachia? It was introduced into mosquitoes to shorten lifespan, indirectly reducing dengue transmission. It worked, but perhaps too well. It was so costly that field releases failed (1/10)
Think of a phenotype and wMelPop will mess with it. Lifespan, fecundity, egg hatch, you name it. Perhaps the most famous of all is the ‘bendy proboscis’ phenotype, which occurs only in older females. Poor lass (2/10)
Then it was discovered that Wolbachia blocks virus transmission directly. Other strains that block dengue were introduced into mosquitoes and these were more benign. They worked great and everyone forgot about wMelPop (3/10)
But this strain is still interesting from an evolutionary perspective. Wolbachia infections are expected to attenuate over time. This can undermine disease control strategies because dengue blockage and other effects might attenuate (4/10)
Over ten years after it was introduced into mosquitoes, we show that wMelPop is pretty much as nasty as it used to be. This is the opposite of what happens in Drosophila simulans, where wMelPop attenuated rapidly (5/10)
wMelPop is difficult to maintain in the lab, so we investigated potential issues surrounding monitoring and evolutionary changes in the nuclear background (6/10)
We show that Wolbachia can be transferred from males to females during mating. This has implications for monitoring Wolbachia infections in laboratory and field populations because uninfected females might be incorrectly scored as uninfected (7/10)
Only some Wolbachia strains are transferred during mating; wMel and wMelPop strains are but wAlbB is not. Weird! (8/10)
Despite these issues, we still think that wMelPop can be useful for suppressing mosquito populations due to its deleterious effects. This does not require sex separation unlike other approaches (9/10)
In conclusion, our results indicate that Wolbachia infections introduced to mosquitoes can remain stable in their effects for years or even decades. This is good news for the strains being released into the field (10/10)
Source for the bendy proboscis video: https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0000516#s5
