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. 2020 Jan 16;10(3):1581-1591.
doi: 10.1002/ece3.6012. eCollection 2020 Feb.

An elusive endosymbiont: Does Wolbachia occur naturally in Aedes aegypti?

Perran A Ross  1 , Ashley G Callahan  1 , Qiong Yang  1 , Moshe Jasper  1 , Mohd A K Arif  2 , Ahmad Noor Afizah  2 , Wasi A Nazni  2 , Ary A Hoffmann  1
Affiliations

An elusive endosymbiont: Does Wolbachia occur naturally in Aedes aegypti?

Perran A Ross et al. Ecol Evol. .

Abstract

Wolbachia are maternally inherited endosymbiotic bacteria found within many insect species. Aedes mosquitoes experimentally infected with Wolbachia are being released into the field for Aedes-borne disease control. These Wolbachia infections induce cytoplasmic incompatibility which is used to suppress populations through incompatible matings or replace populations through the reproductive advantage provided by this mechanism. However, the presence of naturally occurring Wolbachia in target populations could interfere with both population replacement and suppression programs depending on the compatibility patterns between strains. Aedes aegypti were thought to not harbor Wolbachia naturally but several recent studies have detected Wolbachia in natural populations of this mosquito. We therefore review the evidence for natural Wolbachia infections in A. aegypti to date and discuss limitations of these studies. We draw on research from other mosquito species to outline the potential implications of natural Wolbachia infections in A. aegypti for disease control. To validate previous reports, we obtained a laboratory population of A. aegypti from New Mexico, USA, that harbors a natural Wolbachia infection, and we conducted field surveys in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where a natural Wolbachia infection has also been reported. However, we were unable to detect Wolbachia in both the laboratory and field populations. Because the presence of naturally occurring Wolbachia in A. aegypti could have profound implications for Wolbachia-based disease control programs, it is important to continue to accurately assess the Wolbachia status of target Aedes populations.

Keywords: Aedes aegypti; Wolbachia; cytoplasmic incompatibility; dengue.

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Conflict of interest statement

None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Potential crossing patterns between mosquitoes with novel Wolbachia infections that induce cytoplasmic incompatibility and mosquito populations with or without the presence of natural Wolbachia infections of different crossing types. (a) Crosses between mosquitoes with a novel Wolbachia infection and uninfected mosquitoes result in unidirectional cytoplasmic incompatibility. (b) When novel and natural Wolbachia infections exhibit the same crossing type, no cytoplasmic incompatibility occurs. (c) Bidirectional incompatibility occurs when novel and natural Wolbachia infections exhibit different crossing types. (d,e) Unidirectional cytoplasmic incompatibility may occur in favor of the natural (d) or (e) novel infection. These situations are most likely when the natural (d) or novel (e) infection is a superinfection, where one strain is compatible with the single infection but the other is not
Figure 2
Figure 2
Suggested procedure for confirming natural Wolbachia infections
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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