Abstract
The emerging distribution of new alien mosquito species was recently described in Europe. In addition to the invasion of Aedes albopictus, several studies have focused on monitoring and controlling other invasive Aedes species, as Aedes koreicus and Aedes japonicus. Considering the increasing development of insecticide resistance in Aedes mosquitoes, new control strategies, including the use of bacterial host symbionts, are proposed. However, little is known about the bacterial communities associated with these species, thus the identification of possible candidates for Symbiotic Control is currently limited. The characterization of the natural microbiota of field-collected Ae. koreicus mosquitoes from North-East Italy through PCR screening, identified native infections of Wolbachia in this species that is also largely colonized by Asaia bacteria. Since Asaia and Wolbachia are proposed as novel tools for Symbiotic Control, our study supports their use for innovative control strategies against new invasive species. Although the presence of Asaia was previously characterized in Ae. koreicus, our study characterized this Wolbachia strain, also inferring its phylogenetic position. The co-presence of Wolbachia and Asaia may provide additional information about microbial competition in mosquito, and to select suitable phenotypes for the suppression of pathogen transmission and for the manipulation of host reproduction in Ae. koreicus.
Highlights
Five Aedes Invasive Mosquito species are known to be established in Europe [1]
Since in some mosquito populations, Asaia seems to outcompete with Wolbachia symbiont [22], we decided to verify the presence of these two symbionts in a larger number of adults of Ae. koreicus sampled in several villages in North-East of Italy in some of those regions in which this invasive species is predominantly localized (Figure 1)
The Wolbachia bacteria from the two positive individual strains were characterized by the sequencing of the five genes of the Multi-Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) Wolbachia scheme and successive phylogenetic analysis
Summary
Five Aedes Invasive Mosquito species are known to be established in Europe [1]. Aedes albopictus is certainly the most widespread mosquito vector of arboviruses in Europe, including dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika viruses. Several autochthonous cases of Chikungunya and dengue in Italy, France, Croatia, and Portugal have recently been documented [3,4]. The control of Ae. albopictus in the Emilia-Romagna region involved about 300 municipalities, with 4.2 million inhabitants. Public costs for this intervention in 2008–2011 was estimated in approximately EUR 5.5 million/year. In the last few years (2017) new autochthonous outbreaks of Chikungunya occurred in Lazio and Calabria regions and in 2020 the first autochthonous outbreaks of dengue occurred in the Veneto region [4,6,7]
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