Abstract
Insect symbionts are major manipulators of host’s behavior. Their effect on parameters such as fecundity, male mating competitiveness, and biological quality in general, can have a major influence on the effectiveness of the sterile insect technique (SIT). SIT is currently being developed and applied against human disease vectors, including Ae. albopictus, as an environment-friendly method of population suppression, therefore there is a renewed interest on both the characterization of gut microbiota and their exploitation in artificial rearing. In the present study, bacterial communities of eggs, larvae, and adults (both males and females) of artificially reared Ae. albopictus, were characterized using both culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches. Mosquito-associated bacteria corresponding to thirteen and five bacteria genera were isolated from the larval food and the sugar solution (adult food), respectively. The symbiont community of the females was affected by the provision of a blood meal. Pseudomonas and Enterobacter were either introduced or enhanced with the blood meal, whereas Serratia were relatively stable during the adult stage of females. Maintenance of these taxa in female guts is probably related with blood digestion. Gut-associated microbiota of males and females were different, starting early after emergence and continuing in older stages. Our results indicate that eggs contained bacteria from more than fifteen genera including Bacillus, Chryseobacterium, and Escherichia–Shigella, which were also main components of gut microbiota of female adults before and after blood feeding, indicating potential transmission among generations. Our results provided a thorough study of the egg- and gut-associated bacteria of artificially reared Ae. albopictus, which can be important for further studies using probiotic bacteria to improve the effectiveness of mosquito artificial rearing and SIT applications.
Highlights
The tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is known to carry dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses
Given the importance of the gut-associated microbiota for the rearing process and the overall biological quality of artificially produced insects for sterile insect technique (SIT)-based applications, the present study focused on the characterization of the gut-associated bacterial species of a laboratory strain of Ae. albopictus under artificial rearing conditions for potential SIT-based applications
A 16S rRNA gene-based PCR-RFLP assay was employed for the initial characterization and grouping of the bacterial isolates
Summary
The tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is known to carry dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Several novel population suppression methods have been developed against Aedes species and some of them, including the sterile insect technique (SIT), the incompatible insect technique (IIT), the combined SIT/IIT and the Release of Insects carrying Dominant Lethals (RIDL), are currently being tested in small scale pilot trials (Bourtzis et al, 2016; Flores and O’Neill, 2018; Zheng et al, 2019) All these methods should ideally be used as a component in area-wide integrated pest management programs (AW-IPM) (Bourtzis et al, 2016; Bouyer and Marois, 2018). The mass rearing process, handling, packing, transportation and release as well as the irradiation (SIT), the infection with a bacterial symbiont such as Wolbachia (IIT or combined SIT/IIT) or the insertion of a transgene (RIDL) may have a negative effect in the life history traits of the mass reared insect strain and the overall biological quality of the released males (Lees et al, 2015; Bourtzis et al, 2016)
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