The bacterium Wolbachia manipulates reproduction in millions of insects worldwide; the most common effect is cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI). We found that CI resulted from delayed nuclear envelope breakdown of the male pronucleus in Nasonia vitripennis. This caused asynchrony between the male and female pronuclei and, ultimately, loss of paternal chromosomes at the first mitosis. When Wolbachia were present in the egg, synchrony was restored, which explains suppression of CI in these crosses. These results suggest that Wolbachia target cell cycle regulatory proteins. A striking consequence of CI is that it alters the normal pattern of reciprocal centrosome inheritance in Nasonia.
The accessory gland of male insects produces components of the seminal fluid that alter the behavior, physiology and life span of the mated female, and contribute to her efficient storage and utilization of sperm. As a step towards understanding how this occurs, we have isolated genes encoding 12 previously unreported accessory gland-specific mRNAs from the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. We report here the restriction maps of the new genes, the chromosome positions--which are all autosomal--of the 11 non-repetitive genes, their expression patterns, and the sequences of the accessory gland proteins (Acps) encoded by nine of the genes. Eight of the proteins predicted from these sequences begin with putative secretion signals. Following their signal sequences, three of the predicted molecules are peptides and the other five are larger polypeptides with characteristics of cleavable prohormones. The ninth molecule, which has an N-terminal hydrophobic region but no consensus signal peptide cleavage site, is predicted to be a 716 amino acid glycoprotein. Of the nine proteins, two have intriguing similarities to sequences in protein databases. Acp76A is a 388 amino acid pro-protein which contains a signature sequence for the serpin class of protease inhibitors. The 115 amino acid Acp62F has a 28 amino acid region of high sequence similarity to a neurotoxin of the Brazilian armed spider Phoneutria nigriventer. Models are discussed in which Acp76A plays a role in the observed regulation of Acp proteolysis and/or in the coagulation of seminal fluid to form a mating plug, and in which Acp62F contributes to the reported toxicity of Drosophila seminal fluid.
Wolbachia are maternally inherited bacterial endosymbionts that occupy many but not all tissues of adult insects. During the initial mitotic divisions in Drosophila embryogenesis, Wolbachia exhibit a symmetric pattern of segregation. Wolbachia undergo microtubule-dependent and cell-cycle-regulated movement between centrosomes. Symmetric segregation occurs during late anaphase when Wolbachia cluster around duplicated and separating centrosomes. This centrosome association is microtubule-dependent and promotes an even Wolbachia distribution throughout the host embryo. By contrast, during the later embryonic and larval neuroblast divisions, Wolbachia segregate asymmetrically with the apical self-renewing neuroblast. During these polarized asymmetric neuroblast divisions, Wolbachia colocalize with the apical centrosome and apically localized Par complex. This localization depends on microtubules, but not the cortical actin-based cytoskeleton. We also found that Wolbachia concentrate in specific regions of the adult brain, which might be a direct consequence of the asymmetric Wolbachia segregation in the earlier neuroblast divisions. Finally, we demonstrate that the fidelity of asymmetric segregation to the self-renewing neuroblast is lower in the virulent Popcorn strain of Wolbachia.
The most common Wolbachia-induced phenotype in insects is cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI), which occurs when sperm from infected males fertilize eggs from uninfected females. CI produces distinct phenotypes in three closely related haplo-diploid species of the genus Nasonia: mortality in N. longicornis and N. giraulti, and conversion to male development in N. vitripennis. We demonstrate that the majority of CI-induced mortality occurs during embryogenesis and that the pattern of paternal chromosome segregation during the first mitosis is a good predictor of CI phenotype. In N. giraulti and N. longicornis, the paternal chromosomes mis-segregate, producing abnormal nuclei connected by chromatin bridges. Consequently, these embryos arrest development with very few and abnormal nuclei. In contrast, the paternal genome in N. vitripennis is either not segregated or mis-segregates to one of the two daughter nuclei. Consequently, these embryos continue development utilizing the maternally derived haploid nuclei, resulting in male offspring. The latter class is the first documented example of asymmetric mitotic segregation of abnormal chromosomes. We conclude that in haplo-diploids, CI-induced embryonic lethality occurs only when abnormal paternal genome segregation affects both products of the first mitotic division. This is the first study to associate differences in types of CI with specific cytological defects.
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