Wolbachia pseudogenes and low prevalence infections in tropical but not temperate Australian tephritid fruit flies

Jennifer L. Morrow, Marianne Frommer, Jane E. Royer, Deborah C. A. Shearman, Markus Riegler

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    39 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Background: Maternally inherited Wolbachia bacteria infect many insect species. They can also be transferred horizontally into uninfected host lineages. A Wolbachia spillover from an infected source population must occur prior to the establishment of heritable infections, but this spillover may be transient. In a previous study of tephritid fruit fly species of tropical Australia we detected a high incidence of identical Wolbachia strains in several species as well as Wolbachia pseudogenes. Here, we have investigated this further by analysing field specimens of 24 species collected along a 3,000 km climate gradient of eastern Australia. Results: Wolbachia sequences were detected in individuals of nine of the 24 (37 %) species. Seven (29 %) species displayed four distinct Wolbachia strains based on characterisation of full multi locus sequencing (MLST) profiles; the strains occurred as single and double infections in a small number of individuals (2-17 %). For the two remaining species all individuals had incomplete MLST profiles and Wolbachia pseudogenes that may be indicative of lateral gene transfer into host genomes. The detection of Wolbachia was restricted to northern Australia, including in five species that only occur in the tropics. Within the more widely distributed Bactrocera tryoni and Bactrocera neohumeralis, Wolbachia also only occurred in the north, and was not linked to any particular mitochondrial haplotypes. Conclusions: The presence ofWolbachia pseudogenes at high prevalence in two species in absence of complete MLST profiles may represent footprints of historic infections that have been lost. The detection of identical low prevalence strains in a small number of individuals of seven species may question their role as reproductive manipulator and their vertical inheritance. Instead, the findings may be indicative of transient infections that result from spillover events from a yet unknown source. These spillover events appear to be restricted to northern Australia, without proliferation in host lineages further south. Our study highlights that tropical fruit fly communities contain Wolbachia pseudogenes and may be exposed to frequent horizontal Wolbachia transfer. It also emphasises that global estimates of Wolbachia frequencies may need to consider lateral gene transfer and Wolbachia spillover that may be regionally restricted, transient and not inherited.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article number202
    Number of pages16
    JournalBMC Evolutionary Biology
    Volume15
    Issue number1
    Publication statusPublished - 18 Sept 2015

    Bibliographical note

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 2015 Morrow et al.

    Open Access - Access Right Statement

    © 2015 Morrow et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

    Keywords

    • Australia
    • Wolbachia
    • bacteria
    • fruit-flies

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