Abstract
Wolbachia is a common heritable bacterial symbiont in insects. Its evolutionary success lies in the diverse phenotypic effects it has on its hosts coupled to its propensity to move between host species over evolutionary timescales. In a survey of natural host–symbiont associations in a range of Drosophila species, we found that 10 of 16 Wolbachia strains protected their hosts against viral infection. By moving Wolbachia strains between host species, we found that the symbiont genome had a much greater influence on the level of antiviral protection than the host genome. The reason for this was that the level of protection depended on the density of the symbiont in host tissues, and Wolbachia rather than the host‐controlled density. The finding that virus resistance and symbiont density are largely under the control of symbiont genes in this system has important implications both for the evolution of these traits and for public health programmes using Wolbachia to prevent mosquitoes from transmitting disease.
Highlights
Wolbachia is a maternally transmitted bacterial symbiont that produces a remarkably diverse array of phenotypes in arthropods
Our first survival experiment was performed using all the Wolbachia strains in their original host species or background and a virus dose of 3.6 9 1010 Tissue Culture Infective Dose 50 (TCID50)/ml
By comparing several Wolbachia strains in different host species, we found that the symbiont genome was far more important than the host genome in determining the level of protection
Summary
Wolbachia is a maternally transmitted bacterial symbiont that produces a remarkably diverse array of phenotypes in arthropods. Whether a phenotype is controlled by the host or the symbiont genome will determine if Wolbachia-induced phenotypes are transferred along with the infection to the new host and affect the success of the host shift. The role of the host genome in determining the phenotype of Wolbachia infections has been investigated by experimentally moving Wolbachia between host species Many of these studies have investigated reproductive manipulations such as cytoplasmic incompatibility and sex ratio distortion (Fujii, Kageyama, Hoshizaki, Ishikawa, & Sasaki, 2001; Jaenike, 2007; Poinsot, Bourtzis, Markakis, & Savakis, 1998; Sakamoto et al, 2005; Veneti et al, 2012). We find that the level of antiviral protection is largely determined by the Wolbachia strain rather than the host species
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