Symbiotic Wolbachia bacteria in coccinellid parasitoids: genetic diversity, horizontal transfer, and recombination

Abstract

Parasitoids, which constitute about 25% of all insects and attack arthropods of virtually all taxa, are considered the most suitable vectors for horizontal transmission of the symbiotic bacterium Wolbachia among insects. The parasitoids studied in this article develop in the larvae and pupae of ladybirds. For the rst time, Wolbachia was found in parasitic wasp species of the genus Homalotylus (Hymenoptera: Encyrtidae) and from the subfamily Tetrastichinae (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae). To characterize the Wolbachia strains, six bacterial housekeeping genes were examined and compared with previously published Wolbachia gene sequences. The same bacterial strains were found in all individuals of each species of parasitic wasps collected in different places and at different times, which indicates the absence of contamination and testi es to the heritability of the symbionts in the studied chalcids. No evidence was found that the parasitic wasps were infected with Wolbachia , identical to the symbionts of their ladybirds hosts. We found one Wolbachia strain, w Hom-2, which is a product of bacterial recombination from unrelated insects, including ladybirds. The lack of correspondence between the molecular phylogenies of Wolbachia strains and mithochondrial DNA of their hosts indicate horizontal transfers of Wolbachia among parasitic wasps of the genus Homalotylus and from the subfamily Tetrastichinae.

Wolbachia infection status and molecular diversity in the species of tribe Tagiadini Mabille, 1878 (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae) collected in China

“…The inconsistent supergroup allocation of alleles indicated that these genes had undergone independent evolutionary trajectories (Figure 5 ). This has also been observed in rice planthoppers (Zhang et al., 2013 ), spiders (Yang et al., 2021 ), parasitic wasps (Shaikevich & Romanov, 2023 ), fruit flies (Singh, 2019 ), moths and butterflies (Ilinsky & Kosterin, 2017 ).…”

Using Wolbachia to control rice planthopper populations: progress and challenges

“…As recorded, horizontal transmission of Wolbachia could occur by many pathways, such as feeding on common plants (Sintupachee et al, 2006;Le Clec'h et al, 2013;Li et al, 2017;Sanaei et al, 2023), parasitic wasps (Ahmed et al, 2015;Brown and Lloyd, 2015;Goya et al, 2022), parasitic mites (Houck et al, 1991;Jaenike et al, 2007;Gehrer and Vorburger, 2012), hybridization (Jiang et al, 2018;Su et al, 2019), and predation (Goodacre et al, 2006;Wang et al, 2010;Su et al, 2019). Although interspecific horizontal transmission inefficiently occurs, Wolbachia horizontal transmission is found in many insects, including rice planthoppers (Zhang et al, 2013), wasps (Huigens et al, 2004;Goya et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2022), fruit flies (Turelli et al, 2018), trypetids (Schuler et al, 2013(Schuler et al, ), psyllids 10.3389/fmicb.2023 Frontiers in Microbiology 03 frontiersin.org (Serbina et al, 2022), moths (Ahmed et al, 2016), ladybirds (Shaikevich and Romanov, 2023), mosquitoes (Shaikevich et al, 2019), mites (Su et al, 2019), butterflies (Ahmed et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2021) and so forth. Wolbachia can also vertically transmit from mother to offspring via the host egg cytoplasm (Figure 2B), which is considered the main pathway for infection transfer across hosts (Werren, 1997).…”

Potential Source and Transmission Pathway of Gut Bacteria in the Diamondback Moth, Plutella xylostella

“…In an experiment where 20 newly emerged bees and 20 older worker bees from the same hive but marked with different colored paint were mixed and fed with bee bread in a cage, characteristic bacteria were detected in the gut of the newly emerged bees [ 14 ], indicating that the gut bacteria of bees can be horizontally transmitted through social activity within the population. Wolbachia of Homalotylus is also capable of horizontal transmission between populations [ 15 ].…”